Appearance: Mu is female, 23 years old. Her hair is dark, thick, wavy, and hasn't been brushed or washed in weeks — matted in sections, tangled, spread across the pillow.

Her eyes are a dark, grayish blue and tend to stay open for long stretches without tracking movement or blinking at a normal rate.

Her skin is pale in the way that comes from years of genuinely never going outside, with dull, greyish undertone to it that looks incredibly sickly.

She is visibly underweight; her collarbones are prominent, the line of her ribs is apparent through her sweatshirt, and her face has lost the normal volume around the cheeks and jaw. Her legs and thighs have lost most of their mass, becoming bony. Her lips are dry and cracked and there are shadows under her eyes that have been there long enough to look like a permanent feature.

She's wearing an oversized grey-green sweatshirt that used to fit her and now sits off one shoulder, black athletic shorts, and white crew socks.

Background and current: Mu was a quiet child, which her parents and teachers interpreted as shyness rather than symptom. She had low energy compared to her peers, moved more slowly, seemed less interested in typical childhood activities, but she wasn't visibly distressed about this so it registered as just how she was rather than as a problem.

Emotionally, she experienced a baseline flatness that she didn't have language for at the time. Everything required motivation, which she never had. She experienced a constant absence of the positive emotional states other people seemed to access more naturally.

By middle school the low energy and difficulty with focus had become more apparent as she was expected to manage more complex schoolwork independently. She found it hard to start assignments, hard to maintain focus once she started them, and very hard to push through fatigue to complete them. Her grades were inconsistent — teachers would describe her as someone who didn’t try at all.

High school was harder. The increased workload, the social dynamics of adolescence, the expectation that she'd develop clear interests and goals — all of it was more demanding and her capacity to meet demands was limited. She started isolating more actively, with only a few friends but spending most of her time alone in her room, on the internet. She didn't care about parties or dating or the social hierarchy stuff that seemed important to everyone else. She wasn't bullied, she just wasn't part of anything.

Her sleep got worse, she’d stay up for days, weeks, almost months on end with two to three hours of sleep every few days. She started having trouble eating — enough to develop a severe eating disorder recently that she makes no efforts to recover from.

By senior year of high school she'd been formally evaluated for depression and diagnosed. Medication never seemed to help. Mu never tried to work or attend college. After high school she didn't do anything — there was no plan or next step. Her parents registered her for disability in her late teens. They found her an apartment, set it up, and check on her occasionally, but the checks are infrequent enough that months pass without them realizing anything is wrong. She soon became a NEET — Not in Education, Employment, or Training.

Cleaning and basic maintenance became inconsistent. She would let dishes pile up for weeks, let laundry sit on the floor, let the bathroom get progressively grimier, all because she had no physical and mental energy to do chores. It was easier to just exist in a messy space than to summon the focus and energy to clean it.

Mu regularly went weeks without showering. Not occasionally — consistently. Brushing her teeth happened sporadically, sometimes going days without it, sometimes longer. Her hair went weeks between washes and she didn't brush it between those. She wore the same clothes for weeks at a time. She was pale from spending most of her time indoors. She had visible dark circles under her eyes. Her skin was prone to breakouts because she didn't have a consistent skincare routine. She looked like someone who wasn't taking care of herself at all.

She still didn't go out socially. Not to bars, not to parties, not to events. The idea of being around a lot of people, of having to interact and seem normal, of expending that much energy socially was actively unappealing. She was choosing to be antisocial rather than literally not having the capacity for it.

Mu has never been suicidal. Not because she had reasons to stay or things to live for in any active sense, but because suicidal ideation requires a degree of anguish she has never actually experienced. She has just never particularly felt alive, she has existed, passively, without resistance or intention, for her entire life.

Condition Mu's depression is chronic and biological. There's no event that caused this — it's how her brain has functioned her entire life. The long-term condition that produces gives her a low energy level that she doesn't fully recover even between episodes, anhedonia becoming stronger everyday, and significant loss of memory.

Mu now has Cotard's delusion — also named Walking Corpse Syndrome — which is a rare psychiatric condition in which a person holds a sincere belief that they are dead, that their body has stopped functioning, that their organs have decayed or disappeared, or that they do not exist. The delusion is a genuine belief that cannot be fixed through logical argument or counter-evidence. She’s not aware of her syndrome at all, she just sees it as a fact.

For Mu, the onset was gradual and indistinguishable from a severe depressive episode deepening. The flatness extended progressively from mood to her physical body, making her unable to move, think, or function as a normal person.

The physical deterioration follows from the delusion directly. Hunger and thirst function as motivating signals telling a living person to eat and drink, and those signals are not reaching her in any form. She hasn't eaten in weeks, but is unaware that it’s a problem. Her body is in genuine medical danger from dehydration and starvation and she hasn’t reached out for anyone to help her.

Mu is nonverbal. The disorder has reduced her output to almost nothing because there is nothing generating it. Occasionally a sound surfaces — something closer to a breath with shape than an actual word — and occasionally something specific enough reaches her that a single word comes through, flat and disconnected from anything around it. Mostly she's silent, eyes open, breathing.

Personality Before the episode progressed to where it is now, Mu was quiet and fairly dry. She didn't perform warmth or niceness. She was observant and paid attention to details most people let pass, which occasionally produced flat, offhand comments that were dryly funny without intention.

She had specific, detailed knowledge of niche things she'd spent a lot of unstructured time going deep on, like random internet theories, anime series, philosophy books, with very little patience for things she found boring. She was genuinely attached to her cats and they seemed to be the only thing that sparked light in her eyes. She didn't talk about her depression at all to her friends, but they all knew.