Regulation roundabout

Huang is right: Patients can barely protect their rights, admits the deputy director of the Shanghai Mental Health Center.

"In reality, it's possible some patients were mistakenly hospitalized and couldn't get out due to the regulations," says Xu Yifeng.

Xu defines three basic types of institutionalization: patients volunteer, patients don't agree but their doctors and patients' guardians volunteer them or the police deliver someone to the hospital.

"Mental diseases are very different from physical diseases in terms of judgment standards," Xu says.

"There is no absolute criterion for a disease and it usually relies on a psychiatrist's experience. So sometimes it's hard to draw a concrete conclusion."

The physically sick usually don't mind going to hospital whereas the mentally ill nearly always object, meaning their legal guardians must help.

"We wish all patients could come voluntarily," Xu says.

A national mental health law is overdue, both Xu and Huang agree. The first time experts seriously suggested this was in 1985 and a draft law has been discussed and modified at least 15 times by countless government departments and organizations. Regulations followed in Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Ningbo and Wuxi after 2002.

The National People's Congress in 2009 officially announced a law was on the agenda.

Then more silence.

The holdup is caused by bickering between government departments over the basic rights of citizens, congress member Ma Li, a member of the national mental health law making team, told the Xinhua News Agency.

Few issues could be more controversial or sensitive than the assigning of "responsibility" - blame, in other words - to a government department for the forced hospitalization of a Chinese citizen against his will.

"It's not just a medical problem," Ma said, "but a social problem."