Abstract
Mental health legislation aims to find the right balance between the interests of mentally ill patients and the interests of the public. Sociocultural differences between nations result in different approaches to defining this balance in mental health laws and changes within nations over time lead to changes in the regulations used to operationalize these laws. There is general agreement in mental health laws from different jurisdictions about the importance of maintaining patients’ autonomy and their right to receive appropriate treatment. But there are substantial differences across jurisdictions in the mechanisms developed to operationalize these principles. This issue has recently been highlighted in China because regional administrations are now developing or revising local mental health regulations to conform with the principles outlined in the new national mental health law – the Mental Health Law of the People’s Republic of China [1] (hereafter, ‘Mental Health Law’) – which came into effect on May 1st, 2013. Our work on revising the 2002 version of the ‘Shanghai Mental Health Regulations’ has highlighted several problems related to the implementation of the national Mental Health Law’s treatment of the voluntary versus involuntary inpatient admission of mentally ill individuals.
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