Why are prisoners afforded better treatment than psychiatric patients?

I have to credit this question to a beautiful lady friend who's come
into my life recently.

If you compare the best prison in the UK to the worse psychiatric ward
then you can see the insanity of mental healthcare, and it's not the
sort of insanity I approve of.

An unwell person or someone experiencing a life crisis has the same
protocol used as a person who's committed a heinous crime. The UK no
longer murders murderers and capital punishment hasn't been used for
decades. People are aware that prisons are awful places so people have
ensured society doesn't totally destroy the lives of people who've made
a mistake at some point in their life nor punish excessively someone who
hadn't committed the crime but was thought to do so by the jury. An open
prison a friend of mine visited sounded much better than the wards I've
been in.

The problem is it takes knowing the experience from the inside. It takes
knowing what it feels like to be picked up off the road by the police
after a suicide attempt then dragged into a ward. It's knowing that
feeling of waking up after a failed attempt in a fluorescent-lit cell
with white walls and the stench of a hospital. It's the humiliation of
being on close observation. Or the feeling of being in a distressed
state surround by distressed people. It's the feeling of asking for a
phone call to tell my family I was alright and not getting it.

Doctors know the entire psychiatric ward system is shit. The new
president of the Royal College of Psychiatry has gone on record stating
he would want any of his family in there. The system is that fucked. I
think he knows insanity to enough to recognise it in his own profession,
the profession that still uses the same protocol as the worst punishment
offered by humankind in the UK.

Deprivation of liberty is the very opposite of what most people would
associate with happiness. It doesn't taking reading the Foresight
reports or all the other gumpf on well being that's already been
forgotten anyway. It takes a basic bit of common sense. If I took away
your freedom of movement, of choice and of consumption, of contact with
friends and loved ones, of full freedom of choice in what you do on a
daily basis, told you you were mentally ill and needed to take
medication you didn't like then just think for a moment how the fuck
would you feel?

If commissioners walked one day in a psychiatric patients shoes the
system would change overnight. Those poor human beings can end up in
wards for months, years and even longer.