I got struck down with full blown anxiety one day - to the point where I couldn't go anywhere from a constant feeling of being 'drunk'. GPs are pretty much useless for anything that isn't physical, they are like managers with very short appointments and penchant for giving quick fix drugs. I've seen maybe a dozen of them. They like giving out beta blockers, which in my opinion is far better than drugs that alter brain chemistry. They like suggesting CBT which is a cheap type of psychotherapy based on stoicism.

I was self employed and couldn't work - I was a nervous wreck afraid of literally everything, a relative helped me apply for employment support and got it (based purely on my past national insurance payments). It required that I sick notes from a GP every few weeks which was sort-of demeaning given the money I got in a month was the same I could earn in a day.

The government is heavily backlogged, so if you get signed up for employment support then the bureaucracy works in your favour. I filled in one of those Atos questionnaires (which made my anxiety worse) and it took Maximus a year to access me. Funnily, Maximus were still running under the brand of Atos in fear of getting a bad reputation (they're both just hired scapegoats for government decisions). As soon as they did access me the money was stopped, their point system doesn't seem to consider this sort of mental health issue to be important.

I got better on my own, albeit with the help of beta blockers at the beginning. I did it by learning meditation (mindfulness), CBT from stuff I found on the web, a good diet, weight lifting (which is really important for men), walking and stealing ideas from Buddhism and stoicism.

We push ourselves into depression and then anxiety slowly over a long space of time and it takes an equally long space of time to change the mindset and let the brain fix itself. Good luck.