The term is pretty colloquial.

"Nervous breakdown" is lay terminology that's usually used to indicate when a person has reached an emotional and sometimes physiological breaking point of what they are able to handle, stress-wise. This breakdown in ability to cope can come as the result of trauma, a buildup of anxiety, chronic depression, panic disorder, or the onset of many mental health issues. Coping skills have ceased and everything has become acutely and temporarily suspended.

It's typically marked by a shutdown and inability to go about normal daily living routines and self-care independently, and is an acute disconnection from regular routines and responsibilities that is the body and psyche's last ditch effort to try to regroup and regain coping skills.

It's not really a clinical or scientific term, and symptoms have to be treated individually based on severity. Inpatient or outpatient treatment is typically helpful in assisting an individual with regrouping and regaining healthy coping skills, as well as reorganizing things in their lives that contributed to things reaching an overwhelming breaking point. Self-care is huge.

My wife had a heart attack and went to the hospital. I lasted about four days and had my brake down then eight days in a behavioral hospital. We are back together at last and then I found out I had High Strung emotional episodes from her heat attack. I am trying to make a good out of a bad situation. Paul James HS1

Back in March I had a day where everything just came together in a perfect ****storm for me. I had changed insurance and needed some pre-auths for meds I had been on for months, they were dragging their feet so I had been off some stuff that stabilised my moods so I was already doing poorly at that point. The morning it all fell apart for me I got a ticket driving to work because I was late and speeding ($130). I checked my account balance and found out the VA had shorted me $400 due to some sort of quirk of my retirement plan so I was suddenly faced with being broke for two weeks after paying rent. The thing that topped it all off was I went to Walgreen's that night and found out my new insurance plan had a medication deductible I had to meet and my $30 co-pay was suddenly $150 which I could not afford.

I broke down in my car in the parking lot and cried my eyes out for a good ten minutes. I had exceeded my ability to cope and just fell apart. All of this was in addition to some other things going on like a major life transition and pre-existing depression and anxiety not to mention almost six weeks of fighting one of the nastiest flu bugs I had ever had.

As I drove home I began to calm down and by the time I pulled up to my garage I was in the most coldly rational and methodical mode of thinking I had ever felt (well, rational is up to debate). I was, at that point, capable of anything. I decided that I was going to hurt myself because if I didn't, I was going to kill myself. I needed pain and blood and I was going to get it. I went upstairs to my flat, got out of my work clothes, put everything away and went looking for the sharpest knife I could find. After some experimentation I found one and began to cut my left arm to ribbons. I bled, I hurt, and when I was done I felt drained. The experience had been cathartic. I got on-line and found a suicide hotline and spent hours talking to someone with my arm bleeding down onto my black sweatpants. When I was done, I cleaned and bandaged my arm and went to bed and slept like a rock.

That Monday I called my PCP and therapist and told them I needed help. I was put on new anti-depressants by my PCP and was in to see my therapist that day. Mum sent me $150 to get the med I needed and a few extra to get me through to the next payday.

Unfortunately the physical and mental stress of the whole event put me into an acute "awakening/exacerbation" of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia which I am still dealing with. The CFS has all but incapacitated me at times and I'm in the process of tweaking meds with my PCP to find something to help with the fatigue. I don't want to end up one of the 80% of CFS sufferers who go on disability. I'm too young for that and have to much yet I want to do.

So yes, that was my "nervous breakdown" and it was a bad one. I chose the knife over the gun but honestly, in the mental state I was in at the time, it could have gone either way; I was so cold and methodical at the time. It's frightening now to look back and see the mental state I was in at that time.