China's first non-governmental organization (NGO) report on mental health legislation was released on Monday, World Mental Health Day. The report includes input from the Shenzhen-based Equity and Justice Initiative.

The Observation Report on Psychosis and Society (2010-11) shows, during the past decade, legislation regarding mental health has made strides, said Huang Xuetao, a lawyer in the mental health field, also a consultant of the report.

The new Mental Health Law, which will be delivered later this year, ensures a person's right to refuse hospitalization, which Huang said is a complete overturning of the old law.

"Disease should not be a reason to deprive people of their freedom, unless they've committed a crime," Huang told the Global Times. "In the past, mental health lawmaking emphasized how to conveniently send patients to hospital. But now patients have more rights."

Huang added people who get compulsory mental health treatment, such as healthy people who are forced into psychiatric hospitals, will also get more protection.

The report revealed for the first time details of the case of Zhou Rongyan, a civil servant with the agriculture bureau in Chongqing, who spent 12 years on his lawsuit for being forced to get mental health treatment.

"The case is of great significance because it is the first one in which a procuratorate vetoed a court's judgment regarding if a person is fit to be in public," Liu Jiajia, one of the authors for the report, told the Global Times.

In 1998, Zhou had conflicts with his bosses over his dissatisfaction with the housing policy. The latter then brought Zhou to the Ba'nan District People's Court for slander. In December that year, Zhou was sent to a local psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed with psychosis and forced to accept treatment. Zhou was bound, received shock therapy, and was forcibly injected, the report said.

With his family's help, Zhou was diagnosed "healthy" by the West China Center for Medical Sciences, Sichuan University, ending his 96 days of being hospitalized.

Huang said Zhou asked anyone who could help him make appeals and she spent almost two days reading Zhou's judicial documents.

With the Ba'nan District Procuratorate lodging a protest against the court judgment, the Ba'nan District People's Court withdrew its judgment on Zhou's having no capacity for civil conduct in 2008.

"If one was judged as having no such capacity, he himself has no right to make an appeal," said Liu. "Without Zhou's strong will to mobilize  all walks of life for help, it is hard for one to push the procuratorate to show up for help."

Zhou's case underlines the loophole in the law, said Liu. "There should be laws to grant the one who is judged to have no capacity of civil conduct rights to make appeals."