I was hospitalized for about 3 months when I was 15 -- involuntarily committed by my mother. She was just fed up with dealing with the fact that I used drugs basically. The first hospital I was in for one month, they diagnosed me as either schizotypal or schizo-affective, can't remember which, but Mom didn't seem to take that seriously and I was too young to take it seriously or to really understand why they would think that about me. They put me on an antipsychotic called Trilifon and all it did was make my vision blurry. Then the insurance money ran out and I got transferred to a state hell hole -- a place where poverty-stricken people (which we weren't) dump mentally retarded kids (which I wasn't!) they can't care for financially basically -- I was in there with all these other "custodial care" cases. After a couple months of this worthless crap place I finally just told them to re-test me and I lied on the tests and faked the answers according to what I figured society would view as "normal person" answers. They pronounced me "cured" (ha ha ha!) and promptly released me. (What a joke!)

About 10 years ago I went inpatient at a small clinic in Ohio for about 7 or 8 weeks, did so voluntarily to work on some issues at the time. It was a pretty informal and unstructured place, run by a husband-wife team who were both therapists but not psychiatrists, it was more kind of like a therapy/recovery kind of center but they didn't do Dx or full psych evals or anything, they weren't set up for that. Still it was a tremendously relieving time for me, I got a lot of work done in therapy and learned a lot, and it relieved a tremendous amount of pain, stress, agony and trauma I'd been carrying with me all my life to that point. My load would be a lot heavier and my situation far worse if I'd not had that time 10 years ago. But even though it was inpatient, so to speak, it wasn't the same as being in hospital. We were free to come & go, etc. Clients who weren't local roomed there during their stay but a couple local clients drove in daily for group sessions and such.