Bipolar patients in mental institutions

I just watched a movie last night called On the Inside with Olivia Wilde about a convicted murderer sent to a mental institution where he meets a female patient he falls in love with during minimum-security co-ed visiting hours. The girl he likes is bipolar, and has been in the institution for two years, who has no hope of returning to the outside world and living a normal life.

So that made me wonder, how severe does one's bipolar have to be to be locked up in a mental institution for years, without any hope of returning to the outside world? What would have to happen to be locked up like that? Would they not be able to function normally? Would they be delusional or paranoid for long periods of time?

Every time I was locked up in the hospital I wanted to go home. I always wanted to go home, so being locked up would affect me greatly. I was almost put away by my mother who didn't know what to do with me. Just lock me up and forget about me. I think that was the hardest part. I would need to function in the outside world and it would utterly destroy me and all my sense of self. I think I would be completely delusional and lose all track of reality. When I was in the hospital all I did was sleep, didn't shower didn't do anything, just slept.

I assume that if it is a place where a murderer is also housed, then she has done something illegal and has been found "criminally insane." To be found criminally insane you must have committed a crime and it's proven that you had no idea at all the consequences of right/wrong and are usually not fit to stand trial.

I know there was a lady who killed all of her children (I can't remember if she's the one who drowned them in the bathtub or something else.) Anyway, she isn't in prison, she's in a hospital. Because she was suffering from sever post pardum psychosis when the act happened. She's not capable of living on her own and has commited a horrible crime, yet at the same time it was caused by mental illness and now she lives forever in grief because she had no idea what she was doing when it happened. (It is definately a story of the system failing her and her children....)

Also, it's not easy to get hospitalized like that for a crime, even when it's obvious that was what was happening.

Medications in this day and age have even enabled some mental institutions to close their doors. My hope is that society will become so enlightened that these very serious illnesses that take people out of reality will be mitigated and violence will not occur as it has in the past.

This is still, unfortunately, a society that lacks quietness in it, in my view.

You watched a fictional story. Bipolar is a good word you can use to scare audiences and convince them that this character should be locked up long term. Too bad for the writers you actually know what it is, makes the whole thing a lot less frightening doesn't it? Until you realize what your neighbors may think.