Honestly, I think it depends on the hospital and the staff you end up with. Once, I was hospitalized in a crisis center (for not sleeping), and it was a good experience. They still misdiagnosed me with major depression though they did get the panic & anxiety right and got me sleeping again. The doctors were good. The staff was good. There were maybe around 20 patients, tops. It wasn't bad.

Now, the hospital itself...(particularly if you have to be hospitalized in a large city and don't have insurance or a lot of money) can SUCK. I got put in the worst psych ward in Houston, TX. Place stank of urine, men coming onto me all the time, pdoc who wouldn't listen, shots to knock you out if you so much as disagreed with them. Crazy thing too...apparently, I could check myself in, but I could only check myself out with the doctor's say-so. I finally just started agreeing with everything the crazy pdoc said to get myself out of there...they must have had me on 15 medications...it was God-awful. However, I DID need the break from work (it happened that I was the unintended victim of a shooting, which caused me severe panic attacks). I wasn't shot, but I lived in a rough part of town; the guy aimed for the glass patio door of the apartment below me and missed and shot out my glass balcony door, the bullet wedging in a book in a bookshelf across my living room. This happened in the middle of the night. Thankfully, I was in bed because I would have surely been shot had I been in my living room. In hindsight, I probably should have just taken some time off from grad school and gone to stay with one of my grandmothers or my sister (who was still in college in a much safer town).