Underfunded, isolated, state owned, unionized, highly siloed, inpatient psychiatric hospital of last resort. Burned out, often under qualified or totally unqualified staff (e.g. high school educated psychiatric aids). Some of the most bitter, unwelcoming nurses one can imagine. Frequent staff nastiness and brusqueness towards severely mentally ill patients, who they often escalated due to a complete lack of understanding about their Dx/Bx (no nurse, he isn’t back talking you, he’s floridly psychotic, ID, and antisocial...No psychiatric aid, don’t argue with the kid about whether or not Biggie smalls impregnated his mother who is also Biggie’s sister resulting in his birth and subsequent second coming through him... so on and so forth, every day). Poor, run down, crowded conditions for patients, some hadn’t been allowed to be outdoors in years. I caught some out right patient abuses... humiliations, mocking, a likely sexual assault of a physically and mentally incapacitated person by a staffer. An inability to discharge patients to less restrictive settings because no one was willing to take them, sometimes for decades, A ward that had an influenza outbreak that was buried by the nurses because the quarantine procedure meant more work for them and full day contact with the patients. Snowing patients with drugs when they were unruly to the point some barely got out of bed for more than an hour a day for weeks. A patient dying of cancer on a mattress on a floor because no hospice would take her with her psychosis. Being mocked and disdained by some staffers for being kind to patients. Being bullied by the security staff (wouldn’t make my badge/key for weeks and then finally made it with a wrong first name, which I taped over and used the entire year). Having a psychiatrist ask me to Dx a twenty year PD/SO patient with something that’d qualify him for disability in an open inter-team meeting (I declined to evaluate him)... I could go on. Luckily my supervisor was awesome... A real crusader, and she took on all this and more with me...
I was able to help a lot of utterly marginalized folks have a better existence during my time there, and I got to have experience with truly severe MI that few do. I heard my supervisor was sent packing shortly after my stint there, no surprise to me, she battled with admin on the daily and made reports to the state on the regular. What a shame.
So yeah, it really could be so bad... and my super wasn’t doing any of those things you suggested could make it bad, she was my refuge and ally, so quite the opposite.
I’d suggest trying not to reduce others’ experiences into your own so often. You don’t know, it’s totally unhelpful, and it’s unnecessarily dismissive and arrogant.
It was a VA w a senior staff that was like family, which really helped. 
