Right, I've woken up now having had about 3 hours sleep which is good for me these days so now I shall reply.
It's a very good question and it's something that worries many people, including myself before everything. I remember during my gap year when I was looking for HCA jobs, one came up in a mental health ward and one of the 'requirements' that came with the job was to "be able to handle physical attacks" or something like that. Needless to say, that put me off applying and further scared me about things when my own mental health began to kick in.
My experiences were very different to my fears, however. There were all sorts of people admit there, including surgeons, others like me who couldn't be taken in to a local NHS hospital because of a lack of beds, students etc. Just goes to show mental health can affect anyone eh...
Anyway, when I arrived there, I saw another patient sitting in the reception area and he started making conversation with me and I remember feeling slightly scared at the time. He wasn't saying anything scary as such, it was clear he was trying hard to be friendly but I guess the shock of it all did scare me. Then he got me a glass of water when I remarked I hadn't had anything to drink for a while and that eased my nerves
It wasn't just him who was friendly either - pretty much everyone I met there was great. I didn't have a change of clothes and the hospital had none either, so another patient offered to let me wear his spare clothes if I needed them. There was an elderly woman there who was Christian and who'd say she's pray for me *when I told her why I was in (I'm not Christian, but I appreciated the gesture a lot). We all seemed to be like one team there trying to urge each other on and in many ways, because everyone else was not doing great mentally, it made it easier to open up to one another because it really felt like we understood what we were all going through. I guess it reminded me that sure, we are all mentally compromised right now but that doesn't mean we're not normal - we just had a common type of illness that we were trying to fight.
There were some negatives, but nothing really that was very worrying. There were no physical altercations at all in my time there, just some people who got very confused or who were very paranoid would occasionally scream from time to time and it was a bit scary. The staff were very good at dealing with it though. There were some instances of things getting stolen but that was about the worst of it.*
Overall, I was originally scared before I was properly admit but then after getting to see that most people were really in a similar position to me, I wasn't scared at all. I've even got the contact numbers of a few patients who I met there and we like to check up on each other from time to time. I think it's mainly the negative stories that seem to get portrayed by things like the media so most isn't stuff to worry about