A female patient in the Kunming Mental Hospital in Kunming, China. A recent report says that China's mental health care system has huge flaws and the situation is quite chaotic. (China Photos/Getty Images)

Two Chinese public welfare organizations, Mental Illness and Social Watch, and the Shenzhen-based Equity and Justice Initiative, on Oct. 12 published a report titled: “Legal Analysis of China's Mental Health Care System.”

The report says China’s mental health care system has huge flaws and the situation is quite chaotic; it not only threatens public safety, but also places anyone at risk of being “admitted” to mental hospitals.

The report says many genuine mental patients are not able to receive treatment due to financial difficulties. Instead, they are either imprisoned or locked up by family members on a long term basis. Some become homeless and pose a threat to public safety, while their own safety is also at risk.

At the same time, many mentally healthy people are being sent to psychiatric hospitals by people who have conflicting interests with them, therefore unnecessarily being subjected to confinement and painful treatments.

The report says “treating those who do not need to be treated and leaving out those who should be treated” has wasted precious medical resources and harmed innocent people, intensifying social conflicts in China and causing social disharmony.

Old Tactics

Jin Zhong, Editor-in-Chief of Hong Kong’s Open Magazine, said, “The Chinese Communist Party has always been using this method to punish political dissidents, although it is not limited to political dissidents anymore nowadays. They found it more convenient to use this method than going through legal procedures to punish people. They have been doing this all along.”

The report also says that according to statistics published by China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention in early 2009, there were more than 100 million mental patients in China. Research conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) shows mental illness accounts for 20 percent of all illnesses in China, more than twice the world average. WHO also predicted the percentage would grow to 25 percent in the next 20 years.

According to the report, mental health care has become a highly-profitable business in some areas. Some hospitals regard involuntary admission and treatment as ordinary consumer behavior, and are only answerable to the person who admits the “patient” or pays the bill instead of the patient.

In some places, petitioners are labeled as “mental patients” and in a number of cases have been found to be victims of wanton abuse.

The Costs

Jin Zhong feels the high incidence of China’s mental illnesses is an obvious result of the country’s “abnormally rapid” economic development. “Many means and policies are undeniably unfair, and therefore have harmed many people’s interests. Consequently I think the high incidence of mental illnesses in China is a price paid for the abnormally rapid economic growth,” he commented.

According to an official publication on mental health education in 2007, there are nearly 400 recognized kinds of mental illnesses in 10 major categories and 72 subcategories, including Alzheimer's disease, anxiety, insomnia, personality disorder, and mental retardation, etc.

This means patients of all 400 kinds of mental illnesses are at risk of being forcibly admitted to mental hospitals. In addition, there is a category called “suspected mental illness,” which means anyone can become a victim of compulsory admission.

According to the report due to the low yet broad range of standards for admission into China’s mental hospitals, medical staff do not have to see the patient, reach a diagnosis, or take into consideration the patient’s opinion before admitting him. The hospitals can use the sender’s description alone as a basis for diagnosis and forcibly admit the patient, making it not much different from abduction.

Due to such systemic misuse of psychiatric evaluation, some psychiatrists have themselves become victims. For example, the well-known psychiatrist Dr. Ji Shumao of Xi’an Mental Health Center of Shanxi Province was diagnosed with mental illness by authorities at the hospital where he worked, after writing a letter to report on problems at the hospital. The diagnosis was based on just a few comments he made privately to his colleagues.

Read the original Chinese article.