I have been rereading "Night Falls Fast" since Lara mentioned it. The author, Kay Redfield Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, as well as Honorary Professor of English at University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Here is an except from her book "Night Falls Fast".

Psychiatric hospitalization is generally both frightening and reassuring to suicidal patients. It continues to carry a heavy stigma and to create personal, economic, and professional difficulties for many individuals. And as we have seen, it does not prevent all suicides. Hospitals do, however, save many lives, and they relieve not only patients, but also their family members and friends, of the terrible burden of feeling responsible for their own or another's life. Hospitalization is too often seen by both patients and their doctors as a symbolic defeat or as the treatment of last resort, rather than as an occasional necessity for a serious problem. These beliefs, which tend not to accompany decisions to hospitalize people who have other medical conditions, are pervasive and dangerous, and they stand in the way of good clinical care.

William Styron, who described his hospitalization for suicidal depression as a "way station, a purgatory," strongly regretted his doctor's reluctance to admit him to a psychiatric ward"

Many psychiatrists, who simply do not seem to be able to comprehend the nature and depth of the anguish their patients are undergoing, maintain their stubborn allegiance to pharmaceuticals in the belief that eventually the pills will kick in, the patient will respond, and the somber surroundings of the hospital will be avoided...I'm convinced I should have been in the hospital weeks before. For, in fact, the hospital was my salvation, and it is something of a paradox that in this austere place with its locked and wired doors and desolate green hallways - ambulances screeching night and day ten floors below - I found the repose, the assuagement of the tempest in my brain, that I was unable to find in my quiet farmhouse.