Quitting after 5 years - miserable and depressed I'm a fifth year graduate student in the life sciences. To cut to the chase, I hate this PhD, I hate research and I hate academia. It didn't used to be this way.

I have been juggling three different projects and none of them are at the stage where something can be published. One of them was a pilot project, something that my lab or even my advisor has no expertise or basic knowledge for that matter. I have pretty much figured things on my own until we got a collaborator who really helped train me and has gotten this project off the ground. But now my advisor has decided to give this project that now has all the resources, grants etc to a new student.

I'm left with two other projects that are about 3/4th complete but there are quite a bit of holes to fill in.
I could probably finish it in the next one year or so and that's what I thought i will do. 

But my advisor is not an advisor at all. She thinks I have wasted my time and now I'm left with a lot of work to do. She has told me that several times - that I'm not a hard worker and I am not like X or Y in the lab who pretty much live in the lab and have no life outside. I work 10-6 pm everyday and I know that's not a lot in the PhD world, but I feel like I am not productive beyond that. I also work on most weekends. In the past year, I have really tried to motivate myself and get as much work done as possible. Everyone around me says I'm so close and I should just stick it out for another year.

But my advisor keeps telling me that I will never graduate if I don't pick up my pace. No matter how much data I give her, she says this is not fast enough. Also she makes me re-do a lot of it if the data suggests something she doesn't agree with. She has a very narrow mindset and hates being wrong. She always chooses, seminars or committee meetings to tell me that my data is shit and my interpretations are meaningless. And of course, that I am a slacker and I'm useless.

My self-confidence is at an all-time low. I'm depressed and anxious all the time. The thought of lab or my advisor makes me want to run away from all this. To make things worse, my husband just got a job across the country and I see him once a month at the most. Ours has always been a long distance marriage so I'm not a rookie but I think I'm at a point where I really need a support system outside of lab. I have no family around as I'm an international student. 

I'm so miserable all the time and I just want this agony to end. I finally gathered the courage to tell my advisor I want to quit with a masters. She is furious - she told me she is disappointed in me (no surprise there) and she has spent a lot of grant money on my stipend and I owe it to her to publish. My department requires advisors to pay a stipend to every student. And it's not like I have not worked at all. She has added guilt and shame to the wide range of negative emotions I'm already feeling. She says I have wasted her money and done no work.

Anyway, I'm trying to negotiate a masters so I can get out and try to find a job. I need to do something that makes me happy and regain my confidence. I don't even care what I do anymore, I just don't want to feel this way anymore. She is making it hard for me to leave. There is no one in the department that I trust will really help me out. My advisor is powerful and i don't know if anyone can change her mind.

I can't take a break, that is not an option. What do I do? I just want to be told it's okay to leave. People leave jobs all the time but there is so much shame associated with leaving a phd. I also want to know if I can still find jobs in the industry. Please help.
Thanks
&quot;I work 10-6 pm everyday and I know that's not a lot in the PhD world, but I feel like I am not productive beyond that.&quot;
This is a particularly important insight.
When I had successfully defended my prospectus and was officially &quot;all but dissertation&quot; (with the privilege of working on my own self-selected and self-directed topic, with input from my committee) I discovered pretty quickly that for this research—about which I was both intellectually and emotionally passionate—I had about 4 to 5 hours of productive work to give to my dissertation each day. Moreover, simply sitting at my office desk not being productive did not actually measure up as &quot;productivity&quot;.
So I adjusted my expectations to 4 to 5 hours of productive work, and gave myself license for other pursuits for the other hours of my day. Some of these other pursuits were academic: that software I wanted to write; the syllabi for those courses that I wished I could have taken, but they didn't exist, so I wanted to teach them some day; reading to learn new theories, methods, and substantive research; taking courses and attending intensive workshops. All of these &quot;extra&quot; activities have parlayed directly into my subsequent academic work and hires.
Some of the other pursuits were not academic: I walked in the park, went to museums, engaged in art, sport and activism, maintained interpersonal relationships. All of these extra &quot;extra&quot; activities have indirectly parlayed into my subsequent academic work by supporting my mental and physical health, and my development into a well-rounded individual who brings a good deal of experience to the classroom, to the research team, and to my work-fellows. These activities have also sometimes parlayed directly into subsequent academic work through the development of what would become collaborative relationships, introductions to professional networks, and by planting the seeds of research or pedagogical substance.
The idea that you must be a soulless drudge in the academy is certainly a perspective that has its exponents. Academic and activist David Graeber has an interesting perspective on labor time that I think is apt here (and I think it is important that we not forget that we are also labor):

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one of the great divisions between anarcho- syndicalist unions, and socialist unions, was that the latter were always asking for higher wages, and the anarchists were asking for less hours. That’s why the anarchists were so entangled in struggles for the eight-hour day. It’s as if the socialists were essentially buying into the notion that work is a virtue, and consumerism is good, but it should all be managed democratically, while the anarchists were saying, no, the whole deal—that we work more and more for more and more stuff—is rotten from the get-go.
—Frank, T. (2014). David Graeber: “Spotlight on the financial sector did make apparent just how bizarrely skewed our economy is in terms of who gets rewarded”: David Graeber explains why the more your job helps others, the less you get paid. Salon.com, Sunday, June 1st.

To situate my response: my doctorate, completed in 6 years (about median for my cohort) was from Harvard, I readily obtained a post doc, and just as readily obtained a tenure-track faculty appointment in which my &quot;extra&quot; activities alluded to above have contributed in recognized ways to my evaluation and tenure process.
So this answer is not telling you to leave or to stay. Neither is it telling you how to proceed should you stay. But it is attempting to give you license to both value your academic and researcher self as part of a richer and more whole human being, and to reject value systems that tell you otherwise.