I've posted about some of these before, but here goes. I'm not a psychologist but a former mental hospital patient. I'm depressive, but was in a closed psychiatric facility in two occasions. Once this was because I had myself committed because I was s******l and once because there wasn't any space in any other kind of clinic.
* My roommate watched me brush my teeth on one occasion. While I'm doing this, I realize that he's staring at me. I try to ignore it. Then I realize he's staring at my toothbrush. He then tells me, "You shouldn't stick your light saber in your mouth." Okay then.
* There was a former soldier with PTSD that shared a room with me for a few days. I slept with earplugs during this time because he snored, so I only heard this story from fellow patients and I'm not sure it wasn't exaggerated, but something close to it must have happened because I did see the destruction afterward. Guy with PTSD can't sleep, so he goes to the duty nurse for sleep meds. Duty nurse at the time was a major a*****e, not because she wouldn't give you meds if you asked (after all, she's more qualified than you to decide whether you should be given something or not) but because she treated you like an eight-year-old when you did ask, and not everyone in that facility had the mental faculties of an eight-year-old, thank you very much. Anyways, she tells him that he can't have sleeping meds, he should try and sleep without them first, so the guy starts pacing up and down in the hallway. She comes and tells him that he needs to go sleep and that he's disturbing other patients, but he ignores her. She grabs him by the arm - and the guy completely flips, breaks the nurse's arm and tosses her into a wall, beats up two more hospital staff and two policemen that the hospital staff called to the scene. Then the head doctor of the station gets called in (he was off shift when this happened), goes up to the guy telling him something about having a drink with an old comrade, and gives the guy one of those plastic medicine things that look like shotglasses with a massive dose of Diazepine or somesuch, he drinks it and eventually keels over. Again, don't know if it actually went down like this, but I do know the nurse with the broken arm was fired for mistreatment of patients and the hallway looked like it had been the site of a serious fight - the staff was cleaning bloodstains the next morning, the handrails had been ripped out of the wall, and another piece of drywall somewhere looked like someone had been thrown through it. I slept through the whole thing thanks to earplugs.
* There was one of those sliding fire gates that could be shut by pressing a button that could seal off part of the station (a part that was used for daytime activities and no one slept in). During the night, two manic patients were wandering around because they couldn't sleep because that happens when you're manic, and one patient shut the other behind the fire door. The patient that was shut in started yelling "Help!", "Help!" in this really eerie voice that convinced other patients the place was haunted.
* One patient took out his dentures and put them in the dishwasher to clean them. When told that this wasn't a good idea, he cleaned them over the water fountain instead.
* Some of the saner patients when we were close to getting released got permission to go watch a movie at the local theatre. We came back home at 11 pm and as we walked in, someone made a really good joke, so we were all laughing our asses off. Night security guard sees us trying to get into the elevator and comes running. "What are you doing here?" Me: "We're patients from the psych ward." Yeah. We ended up basically getting held by the security guard until some hospital staff came along and confirmed we said who we were. We had a lot of fun pretending to actually be insane in the meantime, asking the security guard whether it was normal to be hearing voices and telling him hotel service sucked in this place, and whether this was an airport and at what time the next flight to Timbuktu would leave, etc. etc. I think he was glad to be rid of us at the end. The hospital staff was NOT amused - but then this wasn't the first thing like this, because a few of us eventually decided "We're already in the nuthouse. This is our chance to do crazy stuff and get away with it, because everyone already thinks we're insane.". Doctor later told me that this type of behavior is called ~~"Cathartic Mania" (might not be the official term, I'm German)~~ Hypomania and happens to a decent fraction of patients in the process of recovering from a depression (basically means you show manic behavior for a short period after recovering from a Depression, but this goes away pretty quickly).
* A different time we got to go out, someone else went and told the hospital staff afterward that I tried to jump in front of a bus. I did no such thing and was feeling well enough that I had absolutely no inclination to do so at the time. I still got two hours of one-on-one therapy with the head doctor who kept telling me that they could only treat me if I was truthful with them, blah, blah, blah. The other patient eventually admitted to lying, luckily.
* A girl kept spitting water at me over dinner, or splashing me with it. Eventually, I got fed up and dumped a caraffe with several liters worth of water on her. Another patient is like "Hey! Wet T-Shirt contest!". Staff was not amused because they had to clean up the mess.
* Someone dumped water into every bed on the station. Not a little bit of water, either, but enough to soak them all. No one ever figured out who it was. I had the theory that this was because whoever had done it couldn't remember having done it and was therefore unable to give him/herself away.
* Went to step into some elevator at one point, was frantically waved off by a doctor standing inside. Standing inside with the doctor (I only got one glance as the elevator door closed) was someone who'd attempted to slit his throat but bungled the attempt. From the amount of blood it looked to me like he should've been lying on a stretcher. No idea what was actually going on there but that image won't leave my mind in a hurry.
* Had a woman (married, ten years older than me, and in there because of postpartum depression) hit on me. It got so obnoxious that the doctors transferred her to a different ward so we wouldn't meet anymore.
EDIT: Added English translation for Hypomania.
EDIT #2: Thank you for the silver, anonymous donor!
* My roommate watched me brush my teeth on one occasion. While I'm doing this, I realize that he's staring at me. I try to ignore it. Then I realize he's staring at my toothbrush. He then tells me, "You shouldn't stick your light saber in your mouth." Okay then.
* There was a former soldier with PTSD that shared a room with me for a few days. I slept with earplugs during this time because he snored, so I only heard this story from fellow patients and I'm not sure it wasn't exaggerated, but something close to it must have happened because I did see the destruction afterward. Guy with PTSD can't sleep, so he goes to the duty nurse for sleep meds. Duty nurse at the time was a major a*****e, not because she wouldn't give you meds if you asked (after all, she's more qualified than you to decide whether you should be given something or not) but because she treated you like an eight-year-old when you did ask, and not everyone in that facility had the mental faculties of an eight-year-old, thank you very much. Anyways, she tells him that he can't have sleeping meds, he should try and sleep without them first, so the guy starts pacing up and down in the hallway. She comes and tells him that he needs to go sleep and that he's disturbing other patients, but he ignores her. She grabs him by the arm - and the guy completely flips, breaks the nurse's arm and tosses her into a wall, beats up two more hospital staff and two policemen that the hospital staff called to the scene. Then the head doctor of the station gets called in (he was off shift when this happened), goes up to the guy telling him something about having a drink with an old comrade, and gives the guy one of those plastic medicine things that look like shotglasses with a massive dose of Diazepine or somesuch, he drinks it and eventually keels over. Again, don't know if it actually went down like this, but I do know the nurse with the broken arm was fired for mistreatment of patients and the hallway looked like it had been the site of a serious fight - the staff was cleaning bloodstains the next morning, the handrails had been ripped out of the wall, and another piece of drywall somewhere looked like someone had been thrown through it. I slept through the whole thing thanks to earplugs.
* There was one of those sliding fire gates that could be shut by pressing a button that could seal off part of the station (a part that was used for daytime activities and no one slept in). During the night, two manic patients were wandering around because they couldn't sleep because that happens when you're manic, and one patient shut the other behind the fire door. The patient that was shut in started yelling "Help!", "Help!" in this really eerie voice that convinced other patients the place was haunted.
* One patient took out his dentures and put them in the dishwasher to clean them. When told that this wasn't a good idea, he cleaned them over the water fountain instead.
* Some of the saner patients when we were close to getting released got permission to go watch a movie at the local theatre. We came back home at 11 pm and as we walked in, someone made a really good joke, so we were all laughing our asses off. Night security guard sees us trying to get into the elevator and comes running. "What are you doing here?" Me: "We're patients from the psych ward." Yeah. We ended up basically getting held by the security guard until some hospital staff came along and confirmed we said who we were. We had a lot of fun pretending to actually be insane in the meantime, asking the security guard whether it was normal to be hearing voices and telling him hotel service sucked in this place, and whether this was an airport and at what time the next flight to Timbuktu would leave, etc. etc. I think he was glad to be rid of us at the end. The hospital staff was NOT amused - but then this wasn't the first thing like this, because a few of us eventually decided "We're already in the nuthouse. This is our chance to do crazy stuff and get away with it, because everyone already thinks we're insane.". Doctor later told me that this type of behavior is called ~~"Cathartic Mania" (might not be the official term, I'm German)~~ Hypomania and happens to a decent fraction of patients in the process of recovering from a depression (basically means you show manic behavior for a short period after recovering from a Depression, but this goes away pretty quickly).
* A different time we got to go out, someone else went and told the hospital staff afterward that I tried to jump in front of a bus. I did no such thing and was feeling well enough that I had absolutely no inclination to do so at the time. I still got two hours of one-on-one therapy with the head doctor who kept telling me that they could only treat me if I was truthful with them, blah, blah, blah. The other patient eventually admitted to lying, luckily.
* A girl kept spitting water at me over dinner, or splashing me with it. Eventually, I got fed up and dumped a caraffe with several liters worth of water on her. Another patient is like "Hey! Wet T-Shirt contest!". Staff was not amused because they had to clean up the mess.
* Someone dumped water into every bed on the station. Not a little bit of water, either, but enough to soak them all. No one ever figured out who it was. I had the theory that this was because whoever had done it couldn't remember having done it and was therefore unable to give him/herself away.
* Went to step into some elevator at one point, was frantically waved off by a doctor standing inside. Standing inside with the doctor (I only got one glance as the elevator door closed) was someone who'd attempted to slit his throat but bungled the attempt. From the amount of blood it looked to me like he should've been lying on a stretcher. No idea what was actually going on there but that image won't leave my mind in a hurry.
* Had a woman (married, ten years older than me, and in there because of postpartum depression) hit on me. It got so obnoxious that the doctors transferred her to a different ward so we wouldn't meet anymore.
EDIT: Added English translation for Hypomania.
EDIT #2: Thank you for the silver, anonymous donor!