I’m a researcher, my current job is not research but I worked in research centers for over 6 years. The experience you have is going to be very different country by country, university to university, department by department and research team to research team. What’s guaranteed is that there is a low chance you wouldn’t be affected by politics and grant money drama. The fitness function is flawed, people are optimizing on number of papers or just getting a paper accepted in a reputed conference or journal (depending on your field of study). Grant proposals are written not to pursue to solve the most important problems in the field but to make sure they appeal to the reviewers eyes and gets us a breathing oxygen to carry on for a few months or years more on our fragile contracts. You might feel anxious to see a new paper is out on your field but the authors haven’t cited your paper! If you don’t have your own grant you have to work on the projects that are available and sometimes they don’t match your profile or desires. You kind of have to get by and do mediocre work. I know there are great teams and institutions that are great to work at and your experience might be delightful and you might get a change to move the needle and push the boundaries of science even further, but more often that not researchers are burning tax money, wasting their lives and negatively affecting the lives of those around them. Yes, many researchers are struggling with their mental healths. Juggling all the nerve wreaking work and uncertainties requires great will to handle and sometimes we succumb to the struggle.