I suffer from the same behavior, ever since I moved from Ubuntu to Debian.

An interactive system that does not interact (terminal not reactive, can't ssh in, screen does not refresh) is broken. I don't understand why this is not a kernel bug.

On my system, to add insult to injury, when the system does come back twenty minutes later, I get a "helpful" pop-up from the Linux Kernel saying "Memory Shortage Avoided". Which is just plain wrong. The pop-up should say "sorry, the kernel bricked your system for a solid twenty minutes for no good reason, please file a report".