Locked-in brain

Chapter 10 endnote 32, from How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Some context is:

A depressed brain is effectively locked into misery. It’s like a brain in chronic pain, ignoring prediction error, but on a much larger scale that shuts you down. [...] When we look at the brains of people suffering from depression, we see activity and connectivity changes that are consistent with this hypothesis.

People who suffer from depression have a pattern of network connectivity that supports the locked-in brain hypothesis. For example, a person diagnosed with depression has a brain that is wired for persistent, intense distress to the point of misery and/or fatigue to the point of feeling dead, both of which are associated with continuous disruption to the body's budget. In addition, each sufferer has a brain that’s inwardly focused and less able to track the outside world (although there may be different patterns of connectivity that achieve this same "locked in" effect; i.e., there is degeneracy). For depression, the one commonality may be that you’re trapped in a past when metabolic needs were high: locked in your mental model of a negative world, insensitive to context and the world around you.

To read more about the locked-in brain hypothesis, see these references.