I was in one from age 16 to age 17. I actually liked it and it was one of the few places I ever met people who were like me. The cultural view of mental illness I absorbed growing up was that of one-dimensional cartoonishness and straitjacket subhumanity, and it took me a while before I learned the truth lol. In the ward, everybody was equalized in their inability to travel lower; in a closed environment decapitated from society, each patient becomes one another's only culture. We empty-handedly passed stories and jokes amongst ourselves; information from the outside world only migrating to us through conversations with staff members. There was genuinely some form of solace in it.
The phrase "don't stick your dick in crazy" was a phrase I heard a lot as a teenager, which cast a binary between girls who weren't crazy, and girls who were, and that it was not your position to judge your placement. I never really understood what "crazy" even meant in this context. Regardless of what I believed, my placement had been judged anyways. So I sat around the ward, catalogued and amongst those catalogued. All teenage girls, each at their own personalized gate to hell. Most with severe eating disorders, several with psychosis, and one who had severe schizophrenia. I'm 24 now and still cuttin' baby