Well, to put it like this..it ain’t the ritz 
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You know here in Denmark they are very human. I was admitted to the ward 4 years ago. I guess I won’t need it anymore because I’m compliant with meds now.
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was in Tenerife mental hospital in 2000
I tried to jump out the window, so the nurses tied me to the bed for a long time similar to a stray jacket , i couldn’t move my body i was fully psychotic
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I remember it as boring place with shared sleeping areas, bad food and generally dull place to be. Very little to do and pretty poor environment for a broken mind. Really a warehouse for mentally ill and not really an idea of a place which would support mental health. But I guess it is a telltale sign how society and people in general value the mentally ill. Thankfully, no need of it these days and that is a good place to be as far as I am concerned.
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I had a good experience and viewed it as a vacation from the real world.
The food & the people was the best.
Yes it is boring if ur healthy while in there.
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No electronics
No cable
Have a smoke at 9 am then at 12 then at 4 then u can smoke til 9 pm
No curtains in rooms shared rooms
No locks on bathroom doors
Some of the nurses are terrible
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I had the same experience that most Americans in here have described. It was awful.
I shared a room with a white supremacist, who had a bunch of prison tattoos. I was so paranoid he was gonna shank me in my sleep or something. Fortunately, I was able to change rooms
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@Tulane I roomed with a lady who was big tall and imposing. I tried to be nice and what have you. She told me she was going to “beat my ass.”. I complained. She stole a pair of my shorts and then threw them at me on the day I was leaving and they stunk to high heaven. I’m kind of soft spoken much of the time and usually not a fight ER. She made more threats and kept pushing me out of line for the cafeteria. and finally I was moved out of the room. That was my worst stay ever.
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That sounds awful! Yeah, my stay was unpleasant too. I lost a bunch of weight because the food was very average, and we weren’t allowed seconds
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Ironically in that hospital it was all you could eat and the food was really good.
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Thank god you arent black
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My stays in private facilities weren’t too bad. State facility was a little worse. The “ER” ward in all of them were a little stressful and they put you there first with people in all different states of psychosis. I went in a year and a half ago when I had much more insight about my illness and it was much less stressful as I wasnt psychotic my voices just kept threatening to command me to kill myself and I wanted a safe place to adjust meds.
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They wouldn’t let me leave the floor to go to the cafeteria. And we would walk around the common area hallway which was as big as a classroom. The whole ward was as big as a classroom. It was extremely cold and the common area consisted of one table where we would eat and recliners. We also sang gospel songs. I didn’t like it.
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I’m in the U.S.A. and I’ve been in one bad one and a couple of good ones. In the bad one my parents were more scared for me than I was for myself. It was deep in the bowels of the county hospital at the end of a long, featureless hallway.
Some of the other guys in there were like zombies from being heavily medicated, some of them were quite scary, I only spent one night in there before my parents pulled some strings to get me out of there. I shared a room with a guy who was so scary looking I was afraid to go to sleep in there, I thought he would wake up and kill me in my sleep.
I was kind of friendly with this one guy in there, I think he liked me, every now and then I will impress somebody, and we played a bunch of games of ping pong. The whole ward was dirty and old and small and crowded. I remember this one lady was apparently a gangster and got on the phone for half an hour and I could hear her giving instructions to whoever she was talking to beat up a couple of people on the outside.
They let us into a small courtyard for 15 minutes to shoot baskets in a rim they had set up out there but everybody was so drugged and out of it that they just stood in a group not moving. The food was not memorable, I forget what they served us. I remember there was a bald girl on the ward, this was 1980, way before anyone shaved their heads voluntarily. There was a ping pong table and nothing else except for some old couches and a few chairs. Yeah, I was there only one night and one day but everybody on the ward were hardcore, tough looking people.
On the other hand I was on Stanford Universities psyche ward which was new, clean and safe. I was there three times in 1988-1989 and the first time I had my own room and the second and third time I shared a room. The ward had a TV, I watched the World Series there and it had a ping pong table and a pool table. Most people looked normal, there wasn’t any wild eyed, bedraggled patients, most people dressed nice. It also had a basketball and volleyball court out back and a lawn where I organized a touch football game, lol.
There was a couple of common showers but you took a shower in privacy by yourself. The food was great and you could go back for seconds. We had ice cream in the freezer at all times too @2Waynez and you could have as much as you wanted at any time. There were some anorexics in there and they had those chocolate and vanilla bottled milkshakes with a lot of calories in the refrigerator for them and we could drink them too.
This was before PC’s and cell phones but art therapy room had a record player in it and I remember I used to hang out in there by myself and I found an old Rolling Stones record in there and I remember playing Sympathy for the Devil over and over again like ten times in a row. We had mandatory morning group therapy meetings first thing in the morning right when we got up.
I hate groups and I hate talking in groups, no one talked less than me on the ward. I remember there was this cute girl sitting across from me in the circle and she got up right in the middle of group therapy and said, “Awww,” and walked over and hugged me. The nurses got mad and told her to sit down and a couple minutes later she got up and walked across the room and hugged me again! Like I said, it was rare in all the hospitals I was in, like 7 different hospitals, but I managed to impress a couple of people in each one and they liked me.
Later that night the girl came to my room but I forget what happened. There was an alcohol rehab ward in the same hospital and they used to hold AA meetings there and I went to 5 or 6 meetings. They didn’t know I was crazy, I don’t know what those alcoholics thought of me.
The ward was in a big separate building right across from Stanford Shopping Center, a large upscale mall and the counselors used to take us to a coffee shop there and buy us coffee and a couple of times they let me out of the ward completely alone to walk around the entire building for exercise. It took about ten minutes to walk completely around it. That’s about all I remember of that place, like I said I was in other hospitals but those were the worst one and best one I was in.
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Room shared with 3 people.
No cellphone.
Maximum 8 ciggies, I usually had 4 and it was when the nurses went outside with us.
One TV for all, also there were occupation therapy once a week.
They force waking up at 7h am and forced to have a shower every day. At 19h30~19h45 we were by bed
Besides that, my parents had to brought toothpaste and toothbrush and we weren’t allowed to have food from outside, like chocolate
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