I need someone to weigh in on this because I am so confused. Sorry this is so long, there's a lot of backstory. My mom got back into the workforce in 2020 after being a happy stay at home mom for nearly 2 decades. She worked as an office manager for about 2 years at which point things hit the fan. It seems like she was getting bullied, and it sent her into a straight up psychotic break (she had no history of mental illness). She thought they were tracking her car, hacking her computer, messing with her purse, she had whole conspiracies about the owners. I literally drove 4 hours with my infant to get her a hotel because she called crying thinking they were outside her house. At the time I didn't really believe most of this because she clearly had lost mental stability. She ended up quitting, seeing a therapist, and getting medicated, all good right? She started a new job at a new company about 6 months after that.
She's been at the new company a little over 2 years, she's still medicated and seems overall mentally sound and yet, it's happening again. Shes always disliked one specific person in her new office, and it sounds like this woman was bullying her. She makes her seem incompetent in meetings through constant snide remarks and forcing unrealistic expectations upon my mom (ex. On Monday my mom asked for feedback on a final draft of a report by wednesday, with the report due Friday, the woman gives her pages of edits Friday morning that are both unreasonable and last minute). This woman is loved by management because work is her life and she's good at what she does, work is not my mom's life, she has reasonable work life boundaries.
I guess what I'm asking is, what should my mom do. She tried going to her manager and they basically pushed everything under the rug and avoided getting HR involved. Since then she feels like she's experiencing retaliation and is now even more scared to go to HR. She's starting to talk like everyone is out to get her and I'm terrified she's headed for another mental break. Should she go to HR?? I have never been in any scenario like this and I literally have no clue what to tell her, also it's hard to be objective because this all happened before. How does this happen twice???