My (31M) coworker (30s?M) seems to have hit rock bottom and is going through a manic episode. I worry nobody is helping him.

A work buddy of mine has been going through a time.

I've known Jim for about 7 years now, on and off. A little over a year I was put on a small team with him and another guy (Ted) to manage a work project. We all live across the country (it's remote work) but we're friends - I wouldn't say close friends but like I wouldn't mind hanging out with these guys some day.

He moved out of nowhere across the country from California to Texas, then abruptly announced that his wife was divorcing him and taking the 2 kids.

Around this time, at work he would begin to act kind of strange. He started talking about very intimate details about his life when it wasn't appropriate, or trailing off into long tangents out of nowhere. One that stands out to me was trailing off in a meeting with some employees under us, he went off saying "you guys have always worked with me and been patient with me. unlike my ex wife, who never did. And it means the world to me." Or something to that effect.

Just about this time there was a tornado and he suddenly didn't have internet or power for a few days, so nobody heard from him. When he finally got to a new temporary location and started to clock in for work again he was acting incredibly erratic, almost scary. He would go on long tangents - he had an idea for a database to keep important files, but any time I asked if he had started making it he literally hadn't even started yet. This escalated to the point where he was on a zoom call with us, pacing back and forth, ranting and raving about everything and anything. Any time we tried to bring up work related topics he'd tell us not to worry about it, and swear up and down he could "use crypto to finance the future," and kept ranting and raving about it. I'm 99% sure he never bought any, but who knows, he was all over the place.

He would ask us for money, and then no matter what we said would start talking about how with crypto he could "run a tik tok hype house" and "save us all from the 9-5 dulldrums. " None of it connected to anything, or made any sense whatsoever. He wants to "have me on his new company as his finance manager." Any time we'd ask what kind of company he wanted to start or what this was all about he would berate us for not "thinking big enough" but never give any sort of specifics beyond the same 10-15 buzzwords.

Come Friday, Ted and I compared notes and it occurred to us that Jim had done, effectively, no work all week and had asked each of us to do all of his stuff for him independently. The handful of his things he did trickled off through the past few weeks, so slowly we hadn't noticed. This got to the point where we spent our last hours clocked in friday literally begging him to put a report together. Ted and I clocked out with Jim swearing he would take care of it immediately or we can "put in a request to terminate me Monday," but I'm 99% sure that report never got done.

This morning I woke up to an absolute deluge - 20 some odd text messages about how he wants to reorganize his life and bring us all into his new world order with him at 4 in the morning.

Some time during all this he told me some very intimate details about his personal life I'd rather not share here, but most pressingly it sounds like his wife won all their friends in the divorce.

I genuinely don't know if this is latent undiagnosed mental illness, a drug bender, or just a mental break from the world's worst midlife crisis, but it sounds like nobody is even around to check up on him. I know for a fact this dude has chronic sleep problems (both narcolepsy and insomnia) as well. Whatever the cause, I'm genuinely a bit worried he's gonna lose his job and end up homeless out of his disillusions of grandeur come monday.

What can I do for this guy? Who on earth can I reach out to?

tl;dr: my work buddy Jim went through a divorce and seems to be going through a manic episode. I'm worried I'm his only friend at this point. What should I do to help him? Who can I reach out to?

Submitted February 11, 2023 at 09:20PM by AnotherManicMan https://ift.tt/26FUYIn