the.com/basket case

means A person (or thing, or organization) so thoroughly unable to function or cope that they've collapsed under the strain.

from Grim and literal at first: after World War I, the phrase was military slang for a soldier who had lost all four limbs and had to be carried in a basket. The U.S. Army actually issued public denials that such cases existed, which only cemented the term in the language. By the mid-20th century it had drifted away from that horror entirely and softened into the figurative sense — someone (or something, like a failing economy) too frazzled or broken to hold itself together.