Take a look and ask yourself how many of these symptoms you’ve noticed this nation exhibiting in the past year or so. If the score is more than 7 out of 10, it’s time to really take care of ourselves.

1.      Interrupted sleep patterns

Well, I don’t know about you, but my wife and I go to bed with BBC news and wake up - too early – with Facebook.  It doesn’t make for a good night’s snooze.

2.      Abnormal eating and drinking

To take your mind of what’s happening, you start self-medicating with food and booze.

3.      Yearning for isolation

Depressed people often go into their shell, becoming anti-social, suspicious of former friends, unwilling to talk and preferring their own company to that of wider society. It’s an early sign that all is not well.

4.      Mental Ping Pong

Your head gets stuck in an internal argument with itself.  This is particularly toxic where there only appear to be two alternatives and neither seem right.

5.      Tunnel Vision

You walk down the street, head down, concentrating on the pavement not on the world around you.  It’s like you’ve committed to a direction and nothing is going to stop you.

You barge strangers out of the way, muttering to yourself.  You cross busy roads without looking, daring the worst to happen.

6.      Tormenting Nostalgia

The real difficulties of today are amplified by comparison with a fantasy, sunlit ‘yesterday’. You torture yourself with the false conviction that everything is worse than it used to be.

If only you could turn back the clock says a malfunctioning memory that has forgotten all the dark days of the past.

7.      Misplaced Confidence

Depression has its manic episodes when despair gives way to euphoric optimism. In these periods we are apt to believe we can do anything, including flying off a building using only our flapping arms for propulsion.

In this heightened but delusional state we will tend to put our trust in the wrong people.   When the mania passes and the high has gone we will wake up to find they have too.

8.      Systemic devolution

Or when the Left Hand hates what the Right Hand is doing. This is when your sense of a unified self begins to deteriorate.  Different parts declare independence from the whole and start to do battle with the rest.

Head and heart are in perpetual conflict. The mouth ingests what the stomach doesn’t need. It’s bonkers but makes dream sense when your mental balance is upset.

9.      Expertophobia

The worse things get, the more an authoritarian voice within insists “I know best”.   If an expert challenges your distorted sense of reality you take it as an attack on your world view.

The loved one who is scared for your welfare is not to be trusted.  The doctor warning you’re seriously at risk is just a killjoy. The grown up term for this is ‘cognitive dissonance’ – the childish one is ‘don’t trust experts’.

10. Lethal Curiosity?  

As a respite from the mental noise and sense of hopelessness  you start to ‘play with fire’. Warnings that this is unwise have the opposite effect as your mocking inner critic dares you not to believe in Project Fear.

You toy with danger, daring it bite you back.   As in, “I wonder what will happen if I punch this bright red button marked Article 50”.

If you agree that the UK has been through a meltdown, then just remember, breakdowns can be a prelude to breakthroughs.  Or break-ups.  What makes the difference is what we - and Europe - do next.

David Pearl is a business innovator and founder of Street Wisdom.