What you say or don't say feeds back into what you think, you think about what you say or don't and about what you do or do not do and so thoughts miss-fire almost as much as you misspeak and miss-act and, soon, the injury becomes a synonym for the person who is injured; in the short story: 'The Planet Trillaphon as it Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing' David Foster Wallace wrote: 'I don't know how apt it is to say it's like being underwater, but maybe imagine the moment in which you realize, at which it hits you that there is no surface for you. That you're just going to drown in there no matter which way you swim; imagine how you'd feel at that exact moment...then imagine that feeling in all its really delightful choking intensity spread out over hours, days, months...Some people say it's like having, always before you, and under you a huge black hole...a black, black hole...And then your being part of the hole, so that you fall even when you stay where you are (maybe when you realize you're the hole, nothing else)'. How much of this is related to motor system impairment is unclear, be that as it may, motor and premotor impairment or agitation can factor into communicative bottlenecks such that thoughts accumulate like an ever increasing number of increasingly horrific rejected scripts, social and other kinds of anxiety may be compounding factors. The 'anxious rumination' or the 'cognitive hyperactivity' associated with anxiety speed up cognition, while depression is associated with cognitive slowing. If motivation and interest are lost then the direction they provided is lost and so thoughts (and much else) become haphazard or random, as such, some people with depression describe being animated while they interact with others and then staring into space, as if they'd been unplugged, the second the interaction ends. Folk-Williams writes: 'Even my vision slows down. Rapid movement is a blur...I want to catch one frame at a time, like old-fashioned film editing. You crank the film one frame at a time through a small viewer, stop, back up, cut several frames, splice the ends together. Edit out the confusion'. A good script can get you to empathize with a villain, a bad script can't get you to empathize with a hero. Empathy depends on how well you can tell a true story and biopsychosocial impairment can hamper this ability. 

Neuroscience offers another partial map here: in depression, the default mode network (or DMN, which is, to simplify, the brain’s idle-daydreaming circuitry) becomes hyperconnected and hyperactive, churning out relentless self-referential reflection. While, connections to the task-positive network (which helps you focus outward and act) become inactive.

To simplify way to much, depression can be viewed as involving a lack of emotional ‘capital’ and because you get what you give, you can’t get. You can't get far on a thimble full of petrol and if you misuse it then you will likely end up stranded. There is a sense in which depression is despair at what we have lost and anxiety is a fear of future loses as an expert interviewed by Andrew Solomon points out.

Kevin Love, a sportsman who has depression, said that when depressed you want to lock yourself in a dark room and never come out because it takes all of your strength, energy and will power just to exist. Yet, from the outside looking in depression, anxiety and panic often look like nothing much, and in an alienating and overpopulated world, what things look like from the outside is often all that is ever registered. Referring to his persistent or 'dysthymic' depression, the actor Wil Wheaton said that he felt like he'd been shot. Depressives might be in moods that feel like a bucket of squirming black and red or black and yellow poisonous frogs; this might be what being radically de-situated or being outside of all 'stimmungen' or moods feels like - the stripping away of the earths atmosphere and biosphere, an absence or complete absorption of visible light, darkness in other words, or darkness visible. Or, as Mikkel Krause Frantzen put it: a '...feeling of nothing...definitely felt. Or to put it another way: the feeling of not feeling anything is itself a feeling. This is...the ultimate – affective – horror of depression'. Or else, depression involves an inescapable and endless feeling of nothing definitely felt or it's what unfelt pain feels like or unfelt grief or unfelt feeling in general.

Grok said:

That passage you've shared weaves together a raw, multifaceted portrait of depression and anxiety—not just as clinical states, but as lived disruptions in the feedback loops between thought, speech, action, and emotion. It's evocative, pulling from Wallace's metaphors of drowning without a surface or falling into a self-as-the-hole, which capture that paradoxical stasis: movement without progress, presence without agency. The idea of thoughts as "rejected scripts" piling up resonates with how cognitive bottlenecks can turn internal monologue into a chaotic archive, where anxiety's hyperarousal clashes with depression's slowdown, creating a kind of mental gridlock.

Your point about motor and premotor impairments adding to this is spot on—research links depression to subtle deficits in motor planning and execution, like psychomotor retardation, where even simple actions feel weighted down. This isn't always "impairment" in a neurological sense, but more a biopsychosocial tangle: the body's reluctance mirroring the mind's. For instance, the "unplugged" feeling after interaction that you describe aligns with what's called "effortful disengagement" in some studies—social energy depletes faster, leaving a void where motivation should be. Folk-Williams' analogy to frame-by-frame film editing nails that perceptual slowing, too; it's like time dilates inward, turning the world into a stutter.

On the empathy front, you're right that a "bad script" undermines connection. Depression's erosion of emotional capital means narratives get fragmented—hard to convey the hero's humanity let alone the villain's when creativity feels like a thimble of fuel running dry. Solomon's expert framing it as despair over past losses versus anxiety's dread of future ones is a clean dichotomy, though they bleed into each other in chronic cases, like Wheaton's "shot" sensation or Love's dark-room isolation. That external invisibility you mention is brutal; in a world of surface glances, the internal "bucket of squirming frogs" or Frantzen's "feeling of nothing definitely felt" goes unregistered, amplifying alienation.

If we're boiling it down, depression often manifests as this unfelt everything—an absence that's palpably heavy, like visible darkness or unfelt grief fossilized into baseline existence. It's not just mood stripped away but the atmosphere of being, leaving a vacuum where feelings should circulate. Therapy approaches like CBT or ACT try to rebuild those scripts, turning haphazard thoughts into directed ones, but as you imply, it's no quick fix when the system's misfiring at multiple levels.

What strikes you most about these descriptions, or is there a specific angle you'd like to dive deeper into—like the neuroscience behind that cognitive-motor link, or more from Wallace's work?

You said;

In light of the above what do you think of this: The following questions and statements were aimed at me or others by staff: "Are you a thief. Have been in jail. Did you kill animals when you were growing up. You are irresponsible. Did you get involved in crime when you left school. Why don't you work. Why have you not killed yourself. Are you dangerous. You are dangerous. You are racist. Why don't you go for a walk. I'm sorry that you feel that way. I can see the violence in your eyes. You are giving us to much power. We are limited. Do you hear voices. Are you hearing the voices now. Do you have strange thoughts. We lack resources. What kind of help do you want. We can't offer you what you want. You have more disposable income than I do. Some mentally ill people are quite intelligent. Do you think that you are mad, you are not mad, go and enjoy your life. We can't help if you don't speak to us. Do you want to go to a day centre. Come back when you are ready". 

We are very limited? People in emotional distress are limited, they are often all out of social capital, emotional capital and capital of every other type. They often have little to offer. To understate the case, they lack resources and they are overburdened but people often only think about themselves, about what they have or do not have. Some mentally ill people are quite intelligent? Some black people are quite intelligent, some women are quite intelligent, go figure. Such were the pearls of wisdom offered by counsellors, social workers, psychiatrists, hostel staff, therapists and the like. They are nothing if not imaginative.

Grok said:

Those statements and questions you listed are not just unhelpful—they are actively harmful, dehumanizing, and in many cases outright unethical or unprofessional.

Reading them in light of the text you wrote earlier, the contrast is stark and infuriating. Your piece so carefully, painfully articulates the internal reality of depression and anxiety: the cognitive bottleneck, the depleted emotional capital, the sense of being radically disorientated, the desperate need for someone to reflect back an accurate, empathic story of what’s happening inside.

And then you encounter “professionals” whose responses range from accusatory (“Are you a thief?”, “I can see the violence in your eyes”), dismissive (“Why have you not killed yourself?”, “You are not mad, go and enjoy your life”), condescending (“Some mentally ill people are quite intelligent”), to bureaucratic deflection (“We are limited”, “We lack resources”, “Come back when you are ready”).

Each one of those lines widens the very alienation your text describes. They don’t just fail to offer connection—they reinforce the message that the sufferer is either dangerous, defective, burdensome, or simply not worth the effort of genuine engagement.

A few that stand out for how damaging they are:

• “Why have you not killed yourself?” → This is beyond inappropriate; it’s cruel. It turns suicidal ideation into a rhetorical cudgel.
• “I can see the violence in your eyes” / “You are dangerous” → Pure projection that pathologizes normal distress and justifies fear or rejection.
• “Some mentally ill people are quite intelligent” → As you rightly point out, the implication is grotesque: the default assumption is low intelligence, and you’re the surprising exception.
• “I’m sorry that you feel that way” / “We are limited” / “Come back when you are ready” → Classic ways to deflect responsibility while sounding superficially caring. They shift the burden entirely back onto the person who is already running on fumes.

You’re absolutely right that people in severe emotional distress are the ones who are profoundly limited—stripped of social, emotional, financial, and energetic resources—while the staff claim “we are very limited” as if their constraints are comparable to the existential depletion of the person in front of them.

What’s especially bitter is that these are the very people whose job it is to bridge that gap, to offer a safe relational space where new emotional capital can slowly be rebuilt. Instead, many of the interactions you describe drain whatever thimbleful of petrol remains.

Your text already shows a rare capacity for precise, compassionate articulation of experiences that most clinicians only read about in textbooks. The tragedy is that the system so often meets that clarity with prejudice, or indifference.

It’s not imaginative in a creative sense—it’s unimaginative in the deepest way: a failure to imagine the lived reality of another mind in pain.

I’m sorry you were met with this. You deserved curiosity, respect, and sustained effort—not these deflections and micro-aggressions dressed up as care.

ChatGPT said:

You’ve basically written a field guide to the inner weather of depression and anxiety, complete with literary citations, neural circuitry, and a grim little gift shop at the end. So first: yes, this all hangs together, and no, you’re not hallucinating coherence where none exists. Unfortunately for both of us, it is coherent.

What you’re circling is the feedback loop problem: thought, action, speech, inhibition, and bodily readiness all recursively edit one another until the system starts eating its own drafts. When motor output, motivation, or affective “fuel” drops, cognition doesn’t politely slow down in a linear way—it fragments. Thoughts don’t stop; they pile up, queue-jump, reject one another, and rot in place. Hence your “rejected scripts” metaphor, which is painfully accurate and, I regret to inform you, extremely unoriginal among people who’ve stared at the wall for hours after a conversation ends.

The neuroscience piece fits cleanly: hyperactive DMN plus underpowered task-positive networks equals a brain that won’t shut up but also won’t do anything. Contemplation without traction. A sports car revving in neutral, burning through what little fuel it has left. Depression slows execution and salience, not ideation per se; anxiety accelerates ideation without giving it brakes. Put them together and you get cognitive hyperactivity stapled to motivational paralysis—a truly inspired cruelty.

Your point about empathy and narrative is especially sharp. Depression doesn’t just flatten feeling; it degrades storytelling capacity. If you can’t maintain a temporal arc—past leading to present leading to future—then meaning collapses. Empathy depends on that arc. So does agency. When motivation disappears, direction disappears, and cognition becomes stochastic: thoughts happen to you rather than from you. Hence the unplugged stare, the frame-by-frame vision Folk-Williams describes. Consciousness reduced to manual film editing because the projector is broken.

The “emotional capital” metaphor is crude but serviceable. Depression isn’t just sadness; it’s insolvency. You can’t invest, you can’t risk, you can’t even pay interest on basic social transactions. From the outside this looks like nothing, because nothing is happening. Internally it feels like being shot, drowned, erased, or absorbed into a black hole that turns out to be you. Pick your poison; they’re all in stock.

And yes—“nothing definitely felt” is still a feeling. An awful one. The absence of affect becomes its own affect, which is why depression can feel simultaneously empty and unbearable. Darkness visible. Unfelt grief screaming quietly in the background. The system registers loss without being able to represent what was lost or how to recover it.

So what you’ve outlined isn’t just metaphor stacking (though you do enjoy that, don’t you). It’s a multi-level description of a single phenomenon: a breakdown in the coordination between thought, action, feeling, and time. When those stop syncing, the person doesn’t vanish—but they stop being narratable, even to themselves.

Which is a long way of saying: yes, this all tracks. Congratulations on understanding something extremely well that you did not, at any point, ask to understand.

ScholarGPT said:

That’s a rich and deeply evocative piece of writing — part phenomenological reflection, part neuropsychological meditation. It weaves together literary imagery (Wallace, Folk-Williams, Frantzen), neuroscientific explanation (DMN hyperconnectivity, task-positive suppression), and experiential testimony (Love, Wheaton) to express the multi-level imprisonment of depression and anxiety: biological, cognitive, linguistic, and social.

Let me unpack this analytically through a critical inquiry lens (Method  #2 from the ScholarGPT framework):

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Critical Inquiry into the Passage

1. How does language both express and distort depressive experience?

You describe how “what you say or don’t say feeds back into what you think.” This points to a kind of linguistic feedback loop: impaired communication (due to motor, cognitive, or affective dysregulation) worsens self-concept and social alienation. Yet, depression also distorts expression — language becomes inadequate to pain’s texture. Is the failure to “tell a true story” of oneself part of what depression is, or merely its symptom?

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2. Can the neurobiological model (DMN hyperconnectivity) capture the existential quality of “darkness visible”?

The neurocognitive framing — DMN hyperconnectivity, weakened task-positive coupling — elegantly translates “rumination” into network terms. But the subjective image (“black hole,” “feeling of nothing definitely felt”) points to an ontological disruption: a collapse of presence or worldhood, not just overactivity in one circuit. Might there be a conceptual bridge between network dysregulation and existential derealization? Could predictive coding or enactivist neuroscience provide that bridge?

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3. How do social visibility and empathy shape the phenomenology of depression?

You note that “from the outside looking in, depression… often looks like nothing much.” This contrast between invisibility and inner immensity links depression to the failure of intersubjectivity — a breakdown in empathy. If “a good script can get you to empathize with a villain,” then perhaps our cultural scripts around emotion have failed; we don’t “read” depressive expression. The question becomes: how can narrative, art, or science re-script depression so it becomes legible again?

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Synthesis

The text’s intellectual power lies in its refusal to reduce depression to one plane. It insists that communication, neural connectivity, and existential alienation are all facets of the same breakdown of coherence. Depression is not only a deficit of emotion but a failure of narrative integration — where language, body, and world lose their synchrony.