Ah - UK psychiatric wards are a little better. You lose some rights (besed on the Mental Health act) but you are still a person so quality of nursing is quite reliable.
I found is difficult because about ⅓ of the people seem sane and you wonder why they are there, ⅓ ofthe people were in distress but you COULD at least talk to them.... then ⅓ of people were psychotic (usually refractive schizophrenia) and would engage you in conversation that was..... well mad.
But as you say, meds were on schedule but as far asI could tell, NO help was given. In 6 weeks I saw a psychiatrist for 10 minutes.
Very lonely.
I cannot compare it to prison. I should think I would kill myself. UK judges KNOW that certain defendants are likely to do so, so intensive mental health treatment is usual - unless it's a crime of dishonesty (i.e. you sought to profit) which is a sign of sanity). If you just go mad and do crazy stuff... they tend to conclude it's drugs and/or mental health. If they can exclude drugs, they DO consider it to be mental health.
Not to say that the UK system doesn't see abuse. Peter Sutcliffe's (The Yorkshire Ripper) defence team argued he had schizophrenia which was ignored. After 2 years in multiple in prisons (all the time the government blocking his move to a mental health unit), the guy ended up in Broadmoor (The State Hospital) because after all of the murders, it was politically unacceptable for the attacker to be seen as mad rather than evil.
I don't see he was a nice guy, but he did believe a Polish War Memorial was rewriting itself every time he visited and giving him instructions.... He had all manner of cardinal symptoms of schizophrenia, but the media had labelled him 'the ripper' and so politicians were too weak to accept expert advice.
Although people don't seem to know that people suffering schizophrenia are thousands of times more likely to hurt themselves than to hurt others. It's just not an illness people ever discuss. It's just so hard to understand what is going on. The symptoms are so diverse (but almost impossible to fake). Alogia, derailment, incoherence, neologisms, echolalia... all 'odd' but not so odd that you don't stop TRYING to communicate... but then, you have to wonder what was meant.
That's why question 1 is ALWAYS 'do you hear voices' to which I can answer NO. But it's not a good test, I don't think.