When asylum seekers are held for years with no decision either way, the waiting does the damage, not any verdict. Time stops measuring progress and becomes a wound, so that even a polite 'How long have you been here?' can tip someone toward thoughts of suicide.
A refugee who cannot go back has to start life over from nothing, and that loss, not just the hardship of the present, feeds constant despair. At night the mind drifts back to a broken landscape that no longer exists as home.
People who escaped being forced to kill often refuse menial degradation in the place of refuge, seeing both as assaults on their dignity. As one says: he left so as not to soak his hands in blood, not to soak them in a toilet.
An asylum system can trap people in a closed loop of rules where every step makes sense on paper and the whole makes none, much like a soldier caught in an army's contradictory orders. Paperwork even rewrites people: those without records get assigned the first day of the first month as a birthday, or are officially 'born' at five.
When people's fate depends on officials they rarely see, anyone in a white coat or a guard's jacket starts to look like the power that decides it. Guards can even play-act as immigration officers, asking 'how did you get here?', because in that limbo the costume carries the weight.