Abstraction=???
Gooseworx says it's akin to Suicide and irreversable. Others in the show treat it the same.
Alex Rochon says it's like them spiraling and needing to go the psych ward (dealing with addiction or mental illness), and Pomni being able to reach Jax at all gives people hope.
I believe that now that the show's over, anything not confirmed or implied can be up for interpretation, and we can headcannon our own theories.
My theory is this: it is very much like death, but can be reversed. It's like entering a coma; they could wake up maybe, but they most likely never will. Reversing what happened to the scan is probably a very complicated and intense process that not even Caine can undo with the snap of his fingers.
It's like an abstracted file, and those can be fixed by removing layers of necessery interfaces, stop the program from writing unessery code, and only retain the useful data, deleting everything else.
Transforming computer lingo into human mind files, those steps sound like rewiring the mind to stop catastropizing and spiraling. Therapy isn't one and done though, it could take years to fix a broken mind.
So for the moment, abstracted=dead, but if they choose to work at it instead of abandoning them, abstracted could just mean broken.
