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I don't know if this has been theorized on before, but to cut the preamble short, my idea is the effects of prolonged use of soulcasters are caused because the soulcasters are draining investiture from your soul (i.e. your innate investiture). To start, for those who don't remember, prolonged use of soulcasting fabrials comes at at a cost to one's body (what I term Prolonged Soulcasting Sydrome (PSS)): WOR Ch. 35 The question is why? (I believe) we know that using investiture has a degenerative effect on oneself, and this was my first thoery, but I think PSS seems to be far too dramatic an effect for this to be the cause. Moreover, surgebinding doesn't seem to cause PSS, and, as far as we know, the fabrials try to mimic the surgebindings, so why one and not the other? The only thing I can think of elsewhere in the cosmere similar to PSS is when one uses Nightblood without breath, which had the effect of draining colour from one's body (before death). So, my idea is that soulcasters (and perhaps other old fabrials, like the regrowth fabrial seen by Nale and nameless Stoneward #1) are meant to be used by surgebinders, and as such, try to draw stormlight from their user. However, for the non-radiant ardents that use them (and thus can't draw in stormlight to fuel the fabrials), it slowly drains the investure from their innate investiture. This is exactly as the case with Nightblood, which normally drains one's breath when used, but if one doesn't have breath, it drains their innate investiture, killing them (if not stopped quickly enough). The difference here is that the soulcasters do this at a much slower rate, hence we only get a physical transformation, and not immediate death (although perhaps after enough use, death will occur). Of course, the obvious problems with this is that the Nightblood effect was only draining one's colour (which makes sense on Nalthis, as colour is drained in awakening), whereas PSS is significantly different, with no Roshar-specific reason that I can think of to explain it. Moreover, shard-severed limbs can be thought of as a damaged innate investiture, and they, like with Nightblood, drain the colour of the limb, not turn it to stone. But perhaps there are different manifestations of losing innate investiture. Or perhaps that is what happens when you drain a lot of investiture from one part of the body, whereas soulcaster-use drains a small amount of investiture from the whole body (PSS seems to effect the whole body at once, whereas Nightblood affects seems to affect your arm first). This idea actually just came to me, so I may add to it more later. So, Plausible? Obvious? clearly wrong? discussed before?