By Lee Kyung-min
The government has strengthened criteria on the involuntary commitment of psychiatric patients to better protect their rights.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare said Sunday the Korean Mental Health Act will take effect on May 30. The revised law seeks to halt the decades-old practice under which patients could be placed in mental institutions against their will. The law allowing that went into effect in 1995.
Under the revised law, a doctor can order an involuntary commitment of a suspected patient for only up to 14 days for further diagnosis with the consent of the patient’s legal guardians. Up to three months of hospitalization is allowed only after another doctor at a separate state-run hospital agrees with the detention.
Starting May next year, the hospital must submit a report to a special committee within three days of admitting a patient. The committee, comprised of up to 30 members with expertise in psychiatry, law and human rights, as well as recovered mental patients, will determine whether the patient needs hospitalization and notify its assessment to the hospital in no more than 30 days. If the committee decides against hospitalization, the patient must be released.
Such measures are a drastic change from the earlier law that allowed a doctor, without a second opinion, to hospitalize a patient for up to six months with the consent of the patient’s legal guardians. The earlier law stipulated the stay be renewed every six months, but the revised law makes it every three months with the agreement of two doctors on the diagnosis.
The strengthened law allows hospitalization only if the patient is both likely to pose a danger to themselves or others and requires hospitalization due to mental illness. The earlier law granted the commitment if only either of the requirements had been met.
The revision comes eight months after the Constitutional Court ruled involuntary commitment unconstitutional last September.
The petition was filed by a woman, 61, surnamed Park, who was taken from her home in Sinsa-dong, Seoul, to a mental institution in November 2013 after her daughter claimed she was suffering from depression. The two had been estranged following a property dispute.
Park used a telephone inside the institution and called one of her friends to help her file an emergency injunction with the Seoul Central District Court seeking release in January 2014.
After release, however, she was readmitted at the request of her daughter, her legal guardian. Park, in response, filed a criminal suit against her daughter for confinement and her daughter agreed to sign a release consent form in exchange for Park dropping the suit. Park underwent a psychiatric evaluation at a separate hospital and was cleared of mental illness.
In a unanimous ruling by nine justices, the court said the law at issue granted a doctor excessive discretion that resulted in great deprivation of a person’s right to remain free.
The court pointed out that the law was feared to be abused by individuals involved in financial disputes, citing a lack of proper measures to assess the conflict of interest between all parties involved.
The court also said six-month institutionalization was too long and feared it to be abused as a means of isolation rather than treatment.
Notifying the patient after the admission, not before, also lacked due process, infringing on the patient’s right to protest the measure that directly affects their personal freedom, the court said.
The ruling is in line with the World Health Organization (WHO), which reaffirmed its support in March for the ministry’s effort toward improving the rights of mental patients.
“We recommend that the Korean government work towards abolishing involuntary admission in the long term in order to bring its mental health legislation more in line with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD),” WHO official Michelle Funk said. “The WHO is willing to support the Korean government in the process.”
According to 2013 data by the National Center for Mental Health, of 69,511 patients admitted to mental institutions, more than two-thirds, or 67 percent, were the result of involuntary commitment, far more than in Germany (17 percent), the U.K. (13.5 percent), France (12.5 percent) and Italy (12 percent).
According to data by the National Human Rights Commission, more than 10,000 complaints were filed between 2010 and 2015 over human rights violations in such institutions.