I don't understand your point about a "sense of duty".
Your only duty is to make decisions in your life which benefit you.
As rewt says, it is not appropriate to be making decisions based on what other people think.
Especially when you are in ill health.
You are trying to solve all of your problems at once when you need to be making decisions one at a time.
Your first and only goal is to decide in your head whether to end the PhD or not.
You dont need to resign but you do need to make that simple decision.
Until you resolve this, it's pointless to think about applying for jobs or anything else.
One decision at a time.

The focus should NEVER be about publishing. It should be about the science. I would avoid any PI who spoke about publications being the point of all of this. If the science is good enough, papers will be a natural by product and you wont have to think about them. You can chuck obsessing about impact factors and the university the work is being done at in there as well. It's all froth and nonsense. The only thing that should matter is the quality of the science being done.

The word "appropriate" doesn't apply here. You are ill. This is not about holidays. This is about your health. If you had broken your leg, you probably wouldn't be asking about this.

The advice I gave you on the last thread still stands and you have not yet said whether you basically want to do the PhD or not. That then causes me some confusion because in your second point you talk about applying for jobs.

It is beginning to sound like you have decided to quit the PhD and that you are asking if it is OK to take a leave of absence and job hunt whilst still being paid the stipend knowing you have no intention of going back to the PhD. Am I correct about this?

TQ, it might be worth checking if you NEED to go through the press office at all. You might have to because you could be construed as representing the university. If you don't, this buys you a lot of freedom and I would consider contacting the head offices of the outlets you are interested in and pitch your idea using a short precis and an offer to write a press release of x words for them.

Personally I would prefer the freedom approach but it's worth checking.

It's a great question TQ and I would be interested to see what others have to say about this.
I have no experience of postdoccing or applying for funding but would the specific funding application process itself not provide details on all of this? I imagine they are all different.

I am not familiar with your area of study but I would have thought that most of your research was coming from primary literature sources - i.e. journal articles rather than books. In that case I would print the articles and use highlighters and post-its and I would probably write summaries of each paper too.

I am also a bit confused when you say "type the passages". You would surely want to summarise in your own words in a separate Word document for each resource you have read.

Isn't investigation of methodology part and parcel of your researching?
You seem to be suggesting it's a separate task.
Is your research showing no literature hits for the methodology you mentioned above?

You need to approach this in a few ways.

1) You need to prioritise coming to terms with your illness. To start with you need to stop calling it C and start calling it by its real name. I think this is the primary root of all your other problems. You then need to accept that this illness has consequences for your ability to continue doing things as you have been up to now. You are trying to carry on as though things have not changed. That is going to make things considerably worse for you physically and mentally. There is no way to sugar coat what is happening to you. How you handle this first big task will determine what you do next.

2) You need to stop expecting things from other people. There is no law which says people have to care about you. If your supervisor doesn't care then that's the end of it. If your colleagues don't want to help you, that is also their right. You cannot control people. What you CAN do is control how you allow their behaviour to affect you. You don't really need any of them. Not really.

3) There is no honour in stubbornly refusing to ask for deadline extensions when you are ill. Don't be silly over this. Get the extension you need. You have more pressing issues righht now than worrying about how others view you.

4) You are having to deal with a major illness but you are worried about looking weak and feeling embarassed about struggling? Once you complete step 1 above, I hope you will come to see how crazy it is to be thinking like this and that you will see more clearly where your priorities are.

It is crucial that you have friends or family who can provide the shoulder you need to lean on during what must be a horrendous time for you. You need all the help you can get. Best of luck with this.

You have said you are not looking for pity so let's try and get a firm grasp on your problem.

Before I offer advice here, I would like to ask two pretty direct questions.

1) Does your supervisor and your colleagues know about your illness?
2) Do you believe the root issue is your illness or your PhD problems or are those two things inseparable?

That's a good point about social media being disruptive technology for marketing.
It used to be that for credibility, a company had to advertise in newspapers, on radio and had to have a landline and a full website and a traditional office location.
My current business has only a Facebook page, a mobile phone and no formal office at all. We run 3 seperate but compatible mini businesses from one premises. Things have completely changed over the last 15 years. The best advice now for a new business is to give out free stuff which costs you nothing (like advice or whatever) to build your potential customer base quickly and then try to upsell for cash from there. Traditional marketing methods dont seem to work anymore. As much as I absolutely loathe Twitter, it does seriously democratise business. Anyone with an internet connection can make money without having any to start with. It's liberating and exciting. Rather than relying on one business idea to bring in all the money you need, it is very common to have several co-existing business streams with each bringing in money, the total being more than enough to live on.

Whether or not your grade will be relevant will depend entirely on what the requirements are for the job you are applying for and how many other better qualified candidates are competing with you.

rewt is mostly correct. Of course the degree matters but real experience is significantly more important. If you have good relevant experience and a good degree, you are likely to be a good candidate for an interview.

This is because, the vast majority of jobs do not need particularly high levels of skill which would justify recruiting a PhD or someone with a 1st class hence this move away from demanding only the top grades for those types of roles. To be honest, I don't understand why companies who, for example, require people like human resource administrators, computer programmers or those working on the production facilities of chemical and biochem factories, don't simply hire motivated school leavers and train them up at a fraction of the wage of someone with a 2:2 who quite frankly is going to be just as useful on day one.

I would suggest that those hiring the very best employees for highly skilled roles will be as demanding as ever as regards grades.

You should avoid seeking further advice from whoever told you that pile of nonsense.
Those who rely on memorising anything soon come up short at one point or another.

People have been following other people for generations. There is an entire industry of celebrity endorsement which works exclusively on the principle. I would be very surprised if you didn't find a whole ton of research on this very weird and utterly depressing phenomena. I'd also be very surprised if there was anything that social media aspect of this could teach us that hasn't already been published.

So, take social media out of the equation and check the literature for celebrity endorsement. You might have better luck there.

ETA: Having thought about this for a bit more, what is particularly striking is that in the absence of traditional, genuine, highly talented, household name celebrities, much of society seems prepared to elevate complete non-entities, who lack any apparent talent whatsoever, into their place. There might be some mileage in researching that phenomenon. It started with Big Brother 18 or so years ago so there won't be much literature about it. You might get a clean run there. Andy Warhol talked about the famous "15 minutes of fame" years before that though so you might have some digging to do if this interested you at all.

Hope98, I am curious to know how you know for certain what was discussed during her viva.
Were you present?

In order to create something which nobody else has done in that field you may well need to go through formal academic literature on the subject rather than online courses or books. Google Scholar is your best bet followed by the use of sci-hub to get around the publisher paywalls.