I have looked at the website where Jordan discusses the ita versus ata arguments. I understand all the examples there but once again, expressions like I am depressed are not shown. In 1965, the Academy of Esperanto came arguably closest to an official position. This is what they said:

1. The Esperanto tense system consists of but three tenses: the present, the past, and the future.

2. All other time relationships (such as the pluperfect, future perfect, etc. of many other languages) are expressed by adverbs, conjunctions, or simply by context.

3. The six participles, used either with nouns or with the verb esti, show aspect, not tense. They show, in other words, in what phase of the action the subject finds himself with respect to the object: whether beginning and unfinished (-ant, -at), finished and fulfilled (-int, -it), or not yet begun but intended or awaited (-ont, -ot).
4. Accordingly the forms with -ata focus upon the duration or repetition of the act, and the forms with -ita focus upon the result of the act. The forms with -ita can also show priority in time in the event that there is separate evidence of that in the sentence, such as a word like jam = “already.”

Please note item 3 and then relate this to my question. Can you argue that I am depressed started in the past (has to, as you cannot suddenly be depressed? In this case, is 'depressed' finished or unfinished. I suppose you could say that the events leading up to being depressed completed something that is finished (but yet ongoing like a building that has been built and is still there. Hm....it is clear to me that there are different schools of thought here.

In response to your (now) penultimate post, NoordZee, I should comment that one should be wary of translating English verbs, especially active verbs (as you appear to have done), literally into Esperanto.

Esperanto, strictly speaking, has only: past, present, and future tenses (and imperative/volitive and conditional, but those are not relevant for the purposes of this discussion).

English has a present simple (I walk) and present continuous (I am walking). There is an analogous pair in the past (I walked, I was walking) and in the future (I will walk, I will be walking). These are not congruent with the Esperanto participles (though they often overlap).

In almost all cases, you would render both the English simple and continuous tenses with the "simple" Esperanto equivalents: -is, -as, -os. Use of esti + -?nta, to express an active verb, is rare because there is no real semantic difference between simple and continuous tenses, and Esperanto aims to avoid grammatical "dead weights".

I think the key, then, is to approach the passive participles, with this mindset, knowing that there are no other "real" tenses; instead, they arise from the relationship between verb tense and participle tense. Resist the temptation to make connections with English.

Instead, imagine the verb and participle being two switches, each of which can be set to one of three settings - past, present, future. The first switch (verb) tells you when the event or described property is happening. The second switch (participle) tells you when the onset of the event or described property is happening relative to the time already indicated by the verb. This is crucial. In mi estas deprimita, the onset was in the past. In mi estas deprimata, it is implied that the onset is now, or that you want to stress that something is actively depressing you right now.

In the case of "deprimi", "okupi", etc., the difference is minimal. But in some other contexts it is clearer. Consider:

La vazo estas rompata. = The vase is being broken now.

La vazo estas rompita. = The vase has been broken. I'm looking at the shattered pieces.

For a better picture, take also the -is forms:

La vazo estis rompata. = The vase was being broken, at the time of some past event.

La vazo estis rompita. = The vase had been broken already, relative to some past event. (Normally similar to the pluperfect in English.)

--obsolete--

nornen:You wrote "rompata" instead of "rompita" in your last example.

It was a typo. Thank you. It has been corrected, along with a few other minor edits for clarity.

Kirilo:Sorry guys, but the ata/ita-debate (of the 1960's) is mainly about the past tense "estis X-ita/-ata"

Yes, this historic dispute doesn't really bear on whether to say mi estas okupita or mi estas okupata. I don't think that the at-istoj of old would say one thing and the it-istoj of old would say another.

Tempo, since rompi is a verb of result without duration, a sentence like la vazo estis rompata is therefore very unnatural, and la vazo estis rompita isn't really the equivalent of the vase had been broken, but the equivalent of the vase was broken - which can mean that it was in a broken state, or that action of breaking took place at that time.

sudanglo:rompi is a verb of result without duration

EDIT: Redacted the previous content of this post. I made a careless error from mis-quoting PAG.

PAG does talk about verbs of duration, something I hadn't considered. I don't have time now but I will investigate this further. At first glance (and I've developed a fairly good intuition for these things) I do not see anything odd with estas rompata to indicate that the vase is being broken now, say by a determined vandal who is finding it resilient.

My initial example was merely to indicate how the participle tense should be interpreted relative to the verb tense. It appears, at least according to PAG, that rompi might be a non-ideal choice. But the general point stands.

OK - Big follow-up and reply to both sudanglo and NoordZee, after some deeper research on the matter.

Plena Analiza Gramatiko (PAG) distinguishes between four kinds of verbs, three of which are relevant for this conversation. (Sec. 110)

1) Verbs that have both continuity (daŭro or duration, as sudanglo put it) and result (rezulto). Examples include legi, konstrui, and -iĝi verbs.

2) Verbs that have only continuity, with no result. These verbs can take only the present participles, because after the verb-event, there is nothing left to talk about. Examples include helpi, interesi, regi, rigardi, etc.

3) Verbs that have only a result, with no continuity. These verbs can take only the past participles, because the verb-event becomes actualised almost imperceptibly, and is known about only a posteriori, through its result. Examples are: kapti, ricevi, rifuzi, etc (and presumably rompi).

For now, at least, I disagree with the above evaluation. I find the breakdown pedantic and overly prescriptivist. A cursory search of the Tekstaro reveals a boatload of participles that should be malformed according to PAG (estis kaptanta, estis suferintaj). Clearly, this account doesn't reflect what proficient Esperantists are actually doing, or how they understand the participles.

Further, there doesn't appear to be a conceptual problem with saying la vazo estas rompata, in the same way that there is with, for instance, trying to form a passive participle from -iĝi. Perhaps rompi does not have inherent continuity the same way helpi does, but I can still imagine witnessing a vase in the process of being broken. It is true that for some verbs, certain participles look uncharacteristic, but it doesn't follow that they can't in principle be used.

The problem it seems, is that PAG labels -inta and -ita as perfect and -anta and -ata as imperfect. This equivalence is controversial if one inteprets Rule 6 of the Fundamento as saying that Esperanto has only three time-tenses, (simple past, simple present, simple future) which by themselves carry no information about progressivity, duration, completedness, etc.

Fundamento:All forms of the passive are rendered by the respective forms of the verb est (to be) and the participle passive of the required verb.

I do not interpret Rule 6 as strictly assigning complex tenses to the various combinations of esti + ?ta. Rather, I believe one should understand participles via the (simple) tense in the adjectival form, relative to the (simple) tense already established in est-. This is a intuitive way of interpeting participles, which will often (but not perfectly) correspond to what we would in other languages call "imperfect", "perfect", "pluperfect", etc.

EDIT: PMEG, interestingly, appears to gloss over PAG's distinction entirely, but makes other points about -at vs -it. I need to investigate more.

Tempodivalse:OK - Big follow-up and reply to both sudanglo and NoordZee, after some deeper research on the matter.

Plena Analiza Gramatiko (PAG) distinguishes between four kinds of verbs, three of which are relevant for this conversation. (Sec. 110)]
Thank you Tempodivalse for your contuing contribution here. If you don't mind, I copy here the 4th kind of verbs.

4. Ekzistas fine ankau verboj h i b r i d a j, kiujn oni povas rigardi preskau
egale kiel verbojn de daiiro sen rezulto aii verbojn de rezulto sen
daiiro; ekzemple okupi povas signifi: preni en posedon (rezult-verbo: la
rezulto estas la posedo ), sed ankau teni en posedo ( daiir-verbo ). (Ce la
koncerna Lingva Respondo, en la frazo "kiam la malamikoj okupas
nian urban, gi estas en tiu momento okupata de ili", la imperfekto
klarigas per tio, ke Z. celis esprimi propre la malvolvigantan agon de la
okupado; kiam tiu estas finita, la urbo estas okupita). Tiaj verboj estas
ekz-e: cirkaiii, determini, karakterizi, lui, ravi, reprezenti, supozi, sirmi.
Tie ci do oni povas uzi preskaii laiiplace perfektajn au imperfektajn
formojn: mi estas okupita aii okupata; vorto estas karakterizita aii karakterizata;
cambro estas luita aii luata ktp. z. preferas ce tiuj verboj la
perfektajn formojn en la pasivo, dum en la simpla aktivo li uzas ilin
kiel daŭr-verbojn. Do: kiun io okupas, tiu estas okupita; kion oni luas,
tio estas luita ktp. Ekz-e: vi, Marinjo, estas efektive afliktita ... Nu, kio
vin tiel afliktas?
A large part of this 4th type of verbs talks about 'okupi', one of these types of verbs that I originally queried. It seems clear that Zamenhof preferred to use the perfect tense in the passive form-hence "Do, kiun io okupas, tiu estas okupita." An interpretation of this sentence could be: If something occupies a person, that person is occupied.

Rule no: 4 seems to answer my question. However, as Tempodivalse indicates, there are still different schools of thoughts about there rules I imagine. Please note that the format of the copied material has suffered somewhat.

This is a real mess, the more I look into it. The differences between PAG and PMEG are very illuminating, but one walks away not sure which, if either, to believe.

@NoordZee, PMEG actually directly discusses the use of passive okupi. The gist is that the actual difference between estas okupita and estas okupata is minimal - similar to what I said in my first post in this thread. So far, my intuitions have not led me astray.

But according to PMEG, there is an asymmetry between -int and -it that I failed to account for.

Translation: "-INT forms always show an action that happened before another action. -IT forms show an action, or the fulfillment of an action, which gave a result. -IT forms can indeed show a time earlier than some other time, but very often it is not so."

Later: "-ANT forms always show, that an action is continuous, unfinished, or repetitive. -AT forms in normal Esperanto show precisely the same nuance."

Remarkably, the example sentence is: Hieraŭ la perditaj aferoj estis trovataj. In other words, the lost things were re-found yesterday, over some period of time.

But this contradicts PAG, which indeed explicitly lists trovi as a result-only verb that should use only the past participle.

PMEG is closer to my intuitions that esti + participle should be parsed as two simple tenses, one in relation to the other. There is no talk in PMEG of imperfect or perfect.

I hope I haven't provided too much information or made things even more confusing. Maybe the upshot is that one should use -iĝ to indicate passive instead, where convenient. Much simpler.

EDIT: I just saw your reply, NoordZee. I was so fascinated by the point brought up by Sudanglo that I forgot that your query was initially about something different! Looks like all this was one large digression, my apologies.

Tempodivalse:

The problem it seems, is that PAG labels -inta and -ita as perfect and -anta and -ata as imperfect. This equivalence is controversial if one inteprets Rule 6 of the Fundamento as saying that Esperanto has only three time-tenses, (simple past, simple present, simple future) which by themselves carry no information about progressivity, duration, completedness, etc.

I do not interpret Rule 6 as strictly assigning complex tenses to the various combinations of esti + ?ta. Rather, I believe one should understand participles via the (simple) tense in the adjectival form, relative to the (simple) tense already established in est-. This is a intuitive way of interpeting participles, which will often (but not perfectly) correspond to what we would in other languages call "imperfect", "perfect", "pluperfect", etc.

I agree with you Tempodivalse that a 'blank' labelling of -inta, -ita as perfect and -anta, ata as imperfect does not adequately address the issues raised in this discussion. I need to read quite a bit more of the verb rules in Plena Analiza Gramatiko and try to analyse them.