Jobergstein,
Talking about suing anyone is nonsense unless you have a swathe of solid evidence to back you up. I would drop this mindset right now and focus on getting prepared for the defence of your thesis.
Pass that and move on with your life. That would be my advice.

It sounds to me that you are only using the threat of suing as a way of making yourself cope with the fear of failing. Using crutches like this is highly destructive and you should stop it today.

rewt, this is very good advice but the problem is that very very few people starting a PhD will have this ability. Even those with a 1st in their subject are going to really struggle to come up with their own research question. This is especially true in science for example where the level of maths required to be able to understand leading edge papers is well beyond that taught at undergraduate level.
Good supervision is needed at this early stage with supervisors helping students to craft the first problem they will solve. If I'd had to come up with my own problem on day one I would still be on my PhD today. Maybe I was just lucky but when I hear starting students being expected to craft their own research proposals I get sweaty palms. Kudos to those of you who can do that.

TheatrePlode, you have two issues here as far as I can tell from your posts. Firstly whether you should do the PhD at all and secondly what to do to support yourself if you quit.
I think you need to separate them because fear of the second issue is forcing a decision on the first issue.

I think you probably don't want to do the PhD. I think you have burnt out. Look in a mirror and ask yourself out loud whether you even want to do a PhD? Forget about alternatives for a moment and resolve this issue first. You can always do a PhD a few years from now.

Having made that decision(assuming you want to quit) the second issue simply becomes a matter of choosing a job. Consider something as stressfree as possible for 12 months to give your brain a chance to calm down a bit. You need much less money to survive than most people think.

Your mental health may not improve until you free yourself from the rat race you are in.

The irony is that your fear of failure is causing you to go down a path which virtually guarantees that this is where you will end up.
There are no easy fixes. It all boils down to how badly you want to finish,

There is only one sustainable way to write a thesis in my experience and that is to break the document down into manageable 2 to 5 page sections. This should be done before a single word is written. Just siting down and writing and making it up as you go seriously risks producing a poor document. Once you have the problem (the thesis) broken down into those small sections, progress can be very quick and easy because the structure of the thesis has written itself in that breakdown.

I know it isn't easy hearing others criticise you, and it sounds like this person is yet another academia arsehole but to be honest I think you would be best to try and focus on what was wrong with both your presentation and your work in general. It sounds like it wasn't as good as you thought it was and it is very important to find out why. Try and see the rest of it as pointless froth.

I have to be honest that if I had been in your situation, I would have walked into that office and asked them straight what their issue was with my performance in a non aggressive but highly assertive manner. Easier said than done but I couldn't have just stood there hearing my work being torn apart.

This won't help the original poster but for anyone else cobsidering this sort of arrangement, it is vital that you have a full signed contract BEFORE you start quitting jobs, signing tenancy leases etc.

TQ, this thread is 6 years old.
fenlon_lisa has re-opened it solely to sell their online editing services.
It's tedious that this is happening again on this site.

Ignore. Didn't read original message properly.

Having a 2:2 will absolutely not rule you out as I personally know of two people who have done this.
However, a 2:2 is a very poor academic baseline from which to attempt a PhD and I would never recommend anyone trying this without at least upgrading to a Masters first.

There should be a special place in hell for those who re-open posts which are nearly a decade old, for no particular reason :-D

It's totally the wrong time to be worrying about whether you are any good or not.
Time is of the essence. Just get the thesis written and worry about the rest of it in March.
The only thing you can do to make your situation worse is to voluntarily do something which will leave a near 5 year gap in your CV.
So, find a way of sucking it up and get the thesis finished.

rewt is right, there really is no magic solution to this. I would say though that Unfortunately, talking about burnout isn't going to be helpful for the same reason I gave earlier. Anything related to health, mental or otherwise, is going to be a massive problem I'm afraid.

It really isn't fair but I'm afraid this seems to be the way of things.

Personally I would go to my supervisor and tell her there was nothing for these students to do and that I didn't need any help at the moment. I would also tell her that I couldn't see a way to chip chunks of my work off to hand to them without it causing me delays amd disruption - the exact opposite of what she intended.

Maybe I am getting old but I just wouldn't stand for that sort of behaviour. Nobody gets to treat my time with such contempt.
Of course there are ways of getting that message across without being a dick but you need to learn to establish boundaries with supervisors because if you don't I guarantee she will do it to you again and again.

You could say that you decided the particular research path you were following turned out not to be of interest to you and that after 18 months you realised it wouldn't bear fruit.
You would need to prepare for some tough questions but this is a better approach I think.