No. I am mid-40s and am in touch with people online who are in their 60s and doing a PhD.

Sounds like Friend C is putting a big responsibility on you there! Is she actually worried about her safety in some way?

I would have a good think about what you stand to gain from confessing (temporary relief of anxiety?) versus what the consequences might be.

Hi Satchi, I can sympathise as I have had a couple of friendships like this and they did not end well! One friend would call up at all times of day and want lengthy conversations about her woes. Nothing I could do would change things (I once got annoyed because she called at midnight looking for support over something quite trivial and I was grumpy with her, and she later said she was waiting for an apology from me!). In the end, I broke off contact with her, because there was nothing I could say that would change her behaviour. The last I heard, she was doing exactly the same sort of thing with other friends.

Another friend is a little bit like your Friend C,and cancels all the time. I have temporarily stopped seeing her (and told her why) because she has flaked out and cancelled arrangements so often, it doesn't feel like a two-way friendship - it goes from her needing support to her wanting to cancel because she feels bad, and never mind what's going on in my life! I will probably pick things up with her again at some point, but at the minute I've told her things are too busy and stressful for me to be in this pattern with her.

Sorry these stories are not very positive - you can try communicating with these friends and setting boundaries with them, but you may need to save your own sanity at the end of the day :)

It is difficult to know what advice to give here because people can give advice based on their research experience - however, you've also said you have OCD, and none of us knows how much all this may be preoccupying you. Are you receiving some support for OCD/anxiety? If those things are particularly bad at the moment, maybe this is not the time to be acting on your worries? To be honest, at undergrad level I would be very surprised if you were the only one not to have carried out your research properly - not that that makes it right, but it happens!

It is difficult to know what advice to give here because people can give advice based on their research experience - however, you've also said you have OCD, and none of us knows how much all this may be preoccupying you. Are you receiving some support for OCD/anxiety? If those things are particularly bad at the moment, maybe this is not the time to be acting on your worries? To be honest, at undergrad level I would be very surprised if you were the only one not to have carried out your research properly - not that that makes it right, but it happens!

It's strange, isn't it? I kind of expected to find myself powering through things at this stage, through sheer terror of my funding coming to an end while I still only had half a thesis, but I'm still procrastinating!

Hi Murtof and Zutterfly

I'm in the 'six months to go/sleeping badly/constant stress' camp too! I haven't sought any treatment but have been trying to do stress management techniques I've used in the past, with mixed results this time. I just try to tell myself that my feelings are very specific to this period, and that my PhD will end, and it will end fairly soon. One thing my supervisor said was to identify my very busiest period, and to look forward to getting that out of the way and then feel that things were easing off after that - my busy period is right now as, like Murtof, I am still collecting data as well as pushing on with analysis/writing - it helps to know that an end is in sight.

Google scholar is all right as it lets you see how many times an article has been cited in other papers. I mostly use my university's own library search engine - does your university's website have a library resources page? I also sometimes use Web of Knowledge (again via my university's website), which allows you to do things like search for the most widely-cited authors in your field.

Oh, the literature review/how much to read seems like a bit of a minefield! I wrote a literature review in my first year, and am leaving it pretty much til the end to update, so that I'll be able to go back over papers without having too many other tasks still in the way (that's the theory, anyway!). I think that as long as you make it clear that you only reviewed papers up to a certain cut-off date, it doesn't matter if something spectacular came along after that date. My problem is that I wasn't very systematic with my initial gathering of the literature, and followed trails of stuff that interested me rather than going through all the results for my key terms, so I think I have some plodding literature searches still to do!

Anyway - hope you all have a good Easter weekend :)