Anyone who's ever lived with little kids knows that everyone in the house adapts to their needs. Goodbye, Dr. Dre in the car and (dis)tasteful nudes on the walls; hello, Barney on the TV and LEGOs under your bare feet. Well, an inpatient facility is a household like any other. That means that everyone lives like children.

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The return of juice boxes is nice, but losing most of your adolescence makes for kind of a poor trade.

"There was a playroom with a bunch of toys and one TV and a chalkboard," says Nate. "If someone was acting up, there was a 'calm down room' where they put them until they calmed down. ... There was snack time and one hour of alone time every day. I normally took a nap, so it was basically nap time. It was lights out at 9 or 10 p.m., and a nurse would check to make sure you were actually sleeping; you couldn't even be reading a book or anything."

Basically, the nurse becomes your medically prescribed mommy.

A prescription parent comes with all kinds of legal requirements -- like feeding and housing you, but also educating you. Since a secure facility can't exactly send you out to the local public school every day, they have their own little school houses right there on campus. You've got children as young as 6 mixed in with teenagers, which means you're not likely to be engaged in a rousing discussion on Russian philosophers (it's ... uh ... it's been a while since we were in school).

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You get a timeout if you don't use all of the Chekhov's building blocks
you took out at the beginning of class.

"This teacher, messily dressed in a suit, would come in and teach us elementary math even though most of us were 14 to 16," Nate says.

Another former patient we spoke to, Nicole, reminisces, "They would give us those giant fuzzy posters, and they would encourage us to color or [use] Play-Doh or whatever. We had to make a project every period. When I came home, I had like five or six of those."

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Nothing ups your chances for an institution-free adulthood like learning absolutely no
marketable life skills at 16.

Amanda says the classes she had were actually great. "I learned more algebra locked up than I did outside," she says. "They let you learn at your own pace, which is good because I think a lot of the people that I was with had learning disabilities. It was like private tutors almost, like if you've ever been taken out of class to get private instruction." So hey, if you're unhappy with your education, consider acquiring a hellish chemical imbalance. Maybe you get the rich-kid treatment, maybe you get Play-Doh -- given the state of the American education system, it might be worth a roll of the dice.

Our sources were being treated for your garden-variety depression, suicidal thoughts, and, in one case, a mysterious hormonal disorder that mirrored bipolar disorder. Encountering people who are clearly worse off than you are can make you feel guilty. Nate says:

"I remember my first day; a 14-year-old girl and I were conversing, and one of the first things she asked me was, 'If you don't mind me asking, why are you here?' [I said,] 'Uh, I'm here because I wanted to kill myself.' [She said,] 'Oh ... I'm here because I tried.' Then she showed me her arms, which were covered in cutting scars. ... I felt guilty for wasting space in this place just because my father hit and screamed at me and my brothers a few times and I merely wanted to kill myself, not having the nerve to actually do it at the time."

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In a "high school" without grades or sports, teenagers will find
some weird stuff to feel competitive about.

Nate eventually realized that making mental illness a competition wasn't exactly productive.

"In one of the group sessions where we went around talking about our problems, when it came to me, I tried to downplay -- even defend -- my father for his actions. Just then, a 16-year-old girl who was physically, emotionally, AND sexually abused by her father told me [my father's] actions were wrong, as it not only hurt me but also hurt me enough to make me suicidal, and everyone else agreed with her and voiced their encouragements to me. I was almost in tears. None of the patients ranked which problems were 'worse' than others, as I was doing. They only empathized with my pain and anguish, something we all had in common."

That makes therapy sound like not such a bad thing. Kind of like Cheers, but without any of the comedy. So more like Wings, we guess ...

Security is pretty tight. You even get random strip searches. "They strip you down to your underwear and check your suitcase, as if something is going to magically appear there even though they checked them a few days before," Nicole says. We assume "suitcase" is a terrible euphemism. But at least prisoners have unfettered access to a shitcan, even if it's right in their cell, in front of God and everybody. Not so for the chronically sad.

"Someone had to unlock the bathroom and stand outside of it," Nicole says. This led to some pretty desperate measures, some of which backfired spectacularly. "One of my roommates, I noticed her on the security camera hovering over the sink one night, and I didn't know what she was doing," Nicole says. "It turned out she was peeing in it to avoid being watched in the bathroom."

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"It's privacy or a clean place to wash your hands. I made the right choice."

"There were cameras everywhere," Amanda agrees, "but I've only been in one facility where they had cameras in the bedroom. There were locks on the doors. ... I was locked in my room and not allowed to leave if I did something wrong." In addition to medically approved timeouts, the juvenile house rules included leaving room for Jesus. "You weren't allowed to touch anybody," Amanda says. "I went for two years without touching anyone. I got out and someone stood too close to me in the lunch line and I almost cried." That's not the only way it was like a high school dance ...

"I was the youngest person on my ward at the time -- and there was a girl behind me who snapped my bra, so I told the tech, and this other girl grabs me by my shoulders and shoves me against the wall and calls me a snitch," Amanda says. Instead of prison-style gang wars, the major disruptions were over something that teens would normally handle over strongly worded and badly misspelled text messages. "There was a love triangle, and when there's a bunch of crazy people in a love triangle, it's never good," Amanda says. "One girl was dating a guy on the ward and slept with another guy, and he found out, and everybody just joined in from there." The resulting kerfuffle was described as a small-scale riot.

Still a better love story than Twilight, though.