@Chopsticks
I can understand the busy schedule leaving no time for online tomfoolery. There’s a reason I gave up the Publiq persona for a few months—different reasons than you, but a similarly packed schedule—no time to be Publiq and exist in the meat realm. It wasn’t a complete cessation of electronics, though, as I had minimal online interactions with a separate crowd under various IRL normie accounts.

Your description makes it sound like not much has changed since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—especially with how you hinted that things can be even worse at the long-term facilities. Wishing you the best of luck in not needing to use them in the future.

It’s because they want to focus on your recovery, and electronics are a distraction from that.

Technically, most mental health hospitals are meant to be hospitals: temporary locations to hold patients in intensive care and recovering safely from said intensive care. The goal is safe, speedy discharge. To that end, you have round-the-clock meets and activities that are usually mandatory for most or all patients. Like group therapy x3 a day.

Some hospitals let up on the weekends though as therapists, social workers, Psychology students looking for a doctorate, and interns (most of the mental health experts you associate with in this setting) take time off. Which can be annoying when you’re admitted later in the day on Friday because you’re guaranteed stuck there a few more days. Especially in the first 24 hours where you’re given time to adjust to the hospital setting and therapy sessions and activities are not mandatory.
It’s also ungodly expensive. I stayed at one for 13 days and I had a $25,000 medical bill. (And 3 days later I was admitted to a different one for 5 days.)

Unfortunately, staff generally treat you like children, complete with coloring books and crayons as activity you can do, with family friendly movie night and ridiculous art therapy trying to open up your feelings or discussing why brushing your teeth regularly helps improve your condition. It’s… really degrading, especially when you go through that crap multiple times.

Staff also bang stuff and yell at you to get out of bed for treatment and meals, even if you are on crutches after jumping off a ledge and breaking a leg instead of dying and you just need time to lie down quietly and mourn. Or when they take 12 hours to get you pain meds after your surgery 2 days prior and you’re screaming in pain and they pin uou down, warn you for your bad behavior, sedate you, and mark you as uncooperative. Then your roommate to talk to is a drunk with anger management issues who narrowly escaped longer prison time.

You can bring a book, but I’ve seen people have their books licked, stolen by a kleptomaniac, and both. (In that case, a girl took a lady’s Bible, then licked it declaring it was hers. Another time she also looked around and thinking when nobody was watching, licked the telephone and hung it back up. She also licked random walls. Everyone had to keep an eye on their stuff because if she fancied it she would lick it and claim it as hers). There’s grosser I will not mention here.

But yes, that is where you go when you are suicidal (like I was)… or if you are anorexic, after discharge from a medical hospital as stabilized but still deemed a danger to yourself with mental health issues with the eating disorder (I met 2 girls in these experiences).

(To answer your other half of the question) Not someplace you want to be for long, and extremely toxic environment for mental health recovery, especially the places with roaches and poor cleaning. Also not helpful are the drug dealers and users there who “hook up” with people there and get them in on it during relapse (which is why patients aren’t supposed to make external connections with each other but they think it helps add to their support system).

There are long-term facilities but they can sometimes be way worse.

… Dang did not intend on that rant, but the topic rubs me a particular way.

@Chopsticks
What’s the purpose of confiscating electronics? Is it because patients are more likely to use them to visit pro-ana groups and other self-harm encouragement circles than to use them to maintain contact with loved ones on the outside?

There it is.

.

@Draco Dei
Most often you’re put in a mental health hospital (once your vitals and all are stabilized). People who are considered an endangerment to themselves or others go here.

You have a roommate with another mental health issue, which can range from hearing voices, Bipolar manic episode, suicidal depression, and also drug addicts and alcoholics who were given this chance over jail to start a monitored “detox” (since quitting cold turkey can be fatal) while attempting to address the mental health behind the addictions.

It’s usually not a very good system and even after 50 years we’ve seen no improvement to future health, at least with suicide patients. It’s not a normal hospital setting, instead it’s very similarly organized like jail, just more lax.

You have to make your bed, march in line, you get 15 mins outside every day (if that), you attend sessions, your room is looked through, you are strip searched, there’s cameras and staff everywhere, and you have supervised, limited visiting hours in a lounge or the closed off cafeteria, and they take away all your electric devices, belts, shoe strings, anything you might strangle yourself or someone with. The chairs are usually blocky and heavy, and there’s no purchase on toilets or plumbing, beds are soft cornered and wide, and you get limited sheets and 1 worn out pillow, 2 if you’re lucky.

You usually can’t be discharged on your own until you demonstrate cooperation and a sense of being alright. (But I also suspect with how bad Sunny is, she might be made to stay in a regular hospital till she’s at least stable in the same way morbidly obese patients would be.) If you’re admitted against your will, you have to prove to a judge you can be released unless someone at the hospital removes that requirement.

I know, I’ve been 6 times at 4 different hospitals. I met 2 people fighting anorexia. Quality of these places range from adequate to awful.

Recovery’s hard but it’s so worth it.

One thing i noticed:
The Colors. They are gone.

I suspect that most real life anorexia cases don’t have an officer of the law willing to check in, on a daily basis if needed, nor three room-mates. Regardless of what real-world medical standards are I suspect that Ponies may be less litigious, so it would be plausible for those to be lower. Thus she might need to do less proving it to the doctor than in most real life situations.

…on the other hoof Hitch has a huge past failure in the realm of judging the character of his friends and letting them get away with being less than they should be over a period of time even when in authority over them. In a word: Sprout. In two words: Emperor Sprout.