I've heard they've become much nicer since I have been. I was a state kid so I stayed in one after another for 7 years (about a year-two years each). I was officially committed when I was 10 years old to a max security and stayed there for a year, then the others followed. It was hell. In fact, I'll be 33 in a couple of weeks and am still receiving treatment for severe PTSD from being in them. I got beat up almost every day, bullied, treated terribly by the staff who used outlawed procedures to subdue me for reasons as trivial as silently crying to myself, I was often left in non-air conditioned quiet rooms for hours on end. They drugged me with medications that caused seizures. At one place, even made me sit in the hall, not allowed to sleep or lie down for two days because at 15, I refused to get a manditory pap smear (I had never had sex of any kind that young). The kids were the most mean. I was quiet, awkward, nerdy and tried like mad to stay in my room because of what they did to me. I was jumped, made fun of for my sexual orientation, even had another teen throw half of a cinder block and hit me in the head with it. The few friends I did manage to make, I got to see taken away, only to come back chemically lobotomized (well, might as well had been). This was the late 80's-mid 90's, though, so things may have changed since then. I voluntarily checked into a local general hospital's private psyche floor for a bad reaction to an SNRI back in 2007, but only stayed there for a week and everyone was surprisingly delightful.