The Involuntary Psychiatric Committal of Li Yixue
李宜雪被精神病始末
Source: Backchina.com (倍可亲)
【Editor’s Note: Li Yixue, a woman from Jiangxi, was forcibly institutionalized at Jiangxi Provincial Psychiatric Hospital after reporting harassment by a police auxiliary officer, Lai, who allegedly assaulted her in her hotel room after a case discussion. On April 22, 2022, after a misunderstanding during a late-night outing, police accused Li of being suicidal and admitted her to the hospital without her consent or a proper psychiatric evaluation. Diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive and personality disorders, Li endured forced medication, restraint, and threats of electroconvulsive therapy before her father secured her release on June 17. Li maintains she was institutionalized in retaliation for reporting Lai and has since sued the hospital for malpractice. Despite evaluations from other medical institutions clearing her of mental illness, Li’s legal fight for justice continues. Her case echoes a 2008 precedent where Jiangxi Provincial Psychiatric Hospital was found negligent in diagnosing a patient with schizophrenia without proper assessment.】
“Do I look mentally ill to you?”
How many times has she asked this question? By now, even Li Yixue (李宜雪) has lost count.
On April 22, 2022, the Dinggong Road Police Station (丁公路派出所) under the Xihu Branch of the Nanchang Public Security Bureau forcibly committed her to the Jiangxi Provincial Psychiatric Hospital (江西省精神病院), citing her as a danger to herself and others.
Upon admission, she was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder and personality disorder, allegedly requiring two months of forced inpatient treatment.
After her release, Li filed a lawsuit against Jiangxi Provincial Psychiatric Hospital, accusing it of medical malpractice throughout her admission, treatment, and care. She demanded that the court conduct a new judicial psychiatric evaluation and that the hospital promise never again to admit her.
On December 6, 2022, her lawsuit was heard at the Qingshanhu District People’s Court (青山湖区人民法院) in Nanchang. After a two-hour trial, the court announced it would deliver a verdict at a later date.
Harassed After Calling the Police
In Li’s view, her forced committal to a psychiatric hospital was the direct result of reporting Lai (赖某), an auxiliary officer at Dinggong Road Police Station.
It began on March 14, 2022. Because of a civil dispute, Li had repeatedly gone to Dinggong Road Police Station for help. When the matter still wasn’t resolved, on April 14, she went there again. “That day happened to be Lai’s shift. He approached me on his own. Before that, I had never met him,” she recalls.
The next afternoon, Li received a call from Lai on his personal cellphone. “He told me he wanted to discuss the case with me. I didn’t give it much thought at the time and agreed.”
Li said she was staying in a hotel near her home because of pandemic restrictions. She initially suggested discussing the matter in the hotel lobby, but Lai insisted the lobby was crowded and said it would be more convenient to talk in her room. Trusting his status as a police officer, Li agreed.
Li recalls that Lai, dressed in civilian clothes, spent about ten minutes discussing her case. Suddenly, he changed tack: “If you become my girlfriend, I can help settle this. Why bother going to the station all the time?” Li says she didn’t respond. “He had been sitting on a chair by the window while I was on the bed. Then he suddenly lunged over, pinned me on the bed, and started touching and kissing me.” She screamed for help to no avail and threatened to call the police. At that point, Lai stopped.
“I took out my phone to make a call, and he snatched it away. I tried to leave, but he blocked the door and wouldn’t let me go,” Li says. Lai then knelt in front of her, slapping himself: “He said he’d liked me ever since he saw me at the station, that he was going through a hard time, that he had depression, all this self-pity, begging me to let him off the hook.”
They remained in a standoff all night. Li admits, “I felt a bit sorry for him, so I didn’t call the police immediately.”
Chat records provided by Li show that Lai later offered financial compensation, saying he had “realized what fear is.”
Reporting the Harassment, Then Being Sent to a Psychiatric Hospital
After this incident, Li struggled with insomnia every night. On the evening of April 21, she went out for a walk to clear her head. “I ended up at a shopping center with a three-story-high railing. I stood there for the breeze. A security guard came and spoke to me, but I didn’t respond. He thought I was about to jump and called the police.”
Li didn’t expect that Dinggong Road Police Station would respond to the call. She remembers a police car arriving soon after, “Four officers got out. One of them recognized me and told me to come down. I refused. Then another police car arrived. More people gathered, and I felt even more reluctant to go down.”
In an interview with a reporter from New Yellow River (新黄河记者), Li repeatedly emphasized that she never intended to jump, only to enjoy the breeze. “If I were really going to jump, would I choose the third floor?”
“They kept talking to me for a long time, persuading me to come down, but I really wasn’t planning to jump. Eventually, I don’t even know why, but I started telling them about how Lai had harassed me,” Li says. The officers’ first reaction, she says, was to turn off their body cams and dismiss the security guard. Then Li was forcibly pulled down from the height and taken to Dinggong Road Police Station. After a short time in the police car, four officers took her to the Jiangxi Provincial Psychiatric Hospital on Shangfang Road in the Qingshanhu District.
“There were four officers: two in the front seats, and in the back seat, I was in the middle with one officer on each side,” Li says. When they arrived at the hospital, one of the officers told her she was just there for a checkup and would be heading back afterward. “I had no idea he was going to process an admission for me.”
Upon admission, a doctor asked Li two questions: “Do you often feel down? Do you often get stuck over trivial issues?” She replied that she sometimes felt low and sometimes lost sleep due to overthinking. Right after that, they took her blood and escorted her to a ward. “They never got my family’s permission, never did any formal psychiatric evaluation. They just asked two questions and locked me in a ward. I wanted to leave, but the two officers blocked me.” Because she was crying and protesting, that night Li was bound to the bed with restraints until morning.
The next day, her attending physician informed Li she was beginning a two-month period of compulsory hospitalization. “My family wouldn’t be able to take me home, either.”
“How Do You Prove You’re Not Mentally Ill?”
To prove she wasn’t mentally ill, Li repeatedly told her attending physician she had been institutionalized for reporting sexual harassment by a policeman and that she was fine. Each time, the doctor reportedly replied, “Everyone in here says they’re fine.”
Li describes her treatment at Jiangxi Provincial Psychiatric Hospital as inhumane. “I had to take medication for mental illnesses every day. If I refused, they’d force it down my throat. One time, I didn’t want to take the medicine and was restrained to the bed for several days. They force-fed the medication daily. After taking it, I’d get drowsy, and my hands and feet would twitch.”
By late May, Li says, she fainted several times on the ward and began having suicidal thoughts. Her attending physician proposed electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which requires general anesthesia and a family member’s consent. “My dad refused,” she says.
On June 17, 2022, Li’s father finally took her home. It wasn’t until after she was discharged that she learned from him that, on the day she was admitted, both the attending physician and someone from Dinggong Road Police Station had called her father. “They said I’d caused trouble and had been forcibly hospitalized. All I know is that my dad never signed any consent form for my admission.”
Once free, Li began her campaign to seek justice. She called the police department’s complaint hotline numerous times, to no avail. Starting in August, she began sharing her story on social media, triggering public attention.
On August 10, the Inspection Division (督察大队) of the Xihu Branch of the Nanchang Public Security Bureau contacted Li. Soon after, Lai was suspended due to the incident, and in September,, he resigned.
An official from the Xihu Branch of the Nanchang Public Security Bureau told New Yellow River that the auxiliary officer in question had been under intense mental stress and was showing signs of depression. After consulting with family, he chose to resign. Multiple departments are currently investigating the case. Preliminary findings exist, but due to privacy concerns, no further details can be disclosed.
This official maintained that allegations of rape “are impossible; it’s untrue.” “The auxiliary officer has also submitted relevant documents to the court to pursue legal channels.” As for Li’s forced hospitalization, the official stated that the police suspected she was mentally unstable, so they took her for an examination. “She’s been involved in multiple suicide incidents. We sent her for an examination. After questioning, the doctors found she had mental abnormalities and decided to admit her. I think the police station acted properly. We followed the rules and took her to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation, and the hospital deemed her mentally ill and admitted her. There’s no issue; the paperwork is complete.”
Seeking Redress After Discharge
From Li’s perspective, however, what the officers did by sending her to a psychiatric hospital—along with the hospital’s willingness to admit her—was worse than anything Lai did.
After being discharged, Li visited the psychiatric department of a Class III general hospital in Nanchang, as well as another specialized psychiatric hospital, to get re-evaluated. According to the evaluations she provided, there was “no sign of depression” and “no sign of anxiety.” Li says she thought about going to every hospital in Nanchang to prove she doesn’t have a mental illness. “When you show up for these tests with no symptoms, everyone is puzzled. People usually come if they need help, not because they’re fine.”
On July 20, Li filed a lawsuit against Jiangxi Provincial Psychiatric Hospital, accusing it of malpractice during her admission, treatment, and care. She requested a new judicial psychiatric evaluation to prove her mental health was normal. She also demanded that the hospital promise never to admit her again. On December 6, the Qingshanhu District People’s Court opened the hearing. After two hours, the court announced that the verdict would be released at a later date.
Before the hearing, Li’s grandfather insisted on issuing a “Certificate of Mental State” on her behalf. He explains that he and his wife raised Li from childhood. “She did decently in school and had no bad habits, but was introverted, not good at socializing, and had few friends. Still, she always came home on weekends to chat with us—out of all the grandkids, she spends the most time with us.” He was “extremely shocked and outraged” by her forced hospitalization. “My granddaughter is definitely not mentally ill.”
In its written defense, Jiangxi Provincial Psychiatric Hospital stated that on April 22, 2022, the police from Dinggong Road Police Station forcibly brought Li in “due to causing trouble and posing danger.” After the hospital’s outpatient evaluation, they admitted her that same day, following the standard procedures for dangerous behavior. The hospital diagnosed her with “obsessive-compulsive disorder” and “personality disorder.” She was detained from April 22, 2022, to June 17, 2022, receiving forced inpatient treatment until her father took her home on June 17, with the knowledge and consent of local police.
When contacted by reporters, Li’s attending doctor declined to comment. “Don’t be misled by rumors. If anything is needed, talk to our hospital,” the doctor said, then hung up. Repeated calls to Jiangxi Provincial Psychiatric Hospital went unanswered.
“I Am Not Mentally Ill”
“I decided to sue the psychiatric hospital first because I want a legal ruling that I’m a normal person. Only then can I continue suing the police station. Otherwise, people will just say I’m crazy,” Li says. Suing Jiangxi Provincial Psychiatric Hospital is her first step toward vindication.
From the moment she learned she would be involuntarily committed, Li began the process of proving, “I’m not mentally ill.”
Her grandfather told China News Weekly (中国新闻周刊) that while she was in the hospital, Li’s father tried multiple times to bring her home but was refused each time. “They wouldn’t even let us visit her.”
Eventually, Li resigned herself to being in the hospital. She would wake at 6 a.m. each morning, have breakfast at 7 a.m., lunch at 10:30 a.m., dinner at 4:30 p.m., and spend the rest of the time in the recreation room with about sixty other patients. Some paced in circles, some sat in silence, and many chatted about why they had ended up there.
When she was first admitted, the hospital diagnosed her with “personality disorder.” By the time she was discharged, they had added “obsessive-compulsive disorder.” Li says the hospital’s assessment was based on her behavior there. She admits she does tend to wash her hands repeatedly—sometimes taking three baths a day. But in the hospital, you might only bathe every three to five days or even once a week. “So each time I did bathe, I spent about forty minutes, and people would scold me. Because of that, they thought I was ‘abnormal.’”
In her lawsuit against Jiangxi Provincial Psychiatric Hospital, Li requests a determination that the hospital committed malpractice in her admission, treatment, and care. She also demands a fresh judicial evaluation to demonstrate her mental health is normal and seeks a commitment from the hospital never again to admit her.
The process of applying to the court for a judicial psychiatric evaluation has been anything but smooth. Li says only three institutions in Nanchang can perform these evaluations: one is Jiangxi Provincial Psychiatric Hospital itself, while the other two—Jiangxi Qiushi Forensic Center (江西求实司法鉴定中心) and Jiangxi Shenzhou Forensic Center (江西神州司法鉴定中心)—declined her case, one saying it only accepts cases with severe brain injuries, and the other claiming insufficient materials.
On November 27, 2022, Li went to a Class III hospital to be assessed. After a consultation, a brain CT, and some rating scales, the hospital reported “no signs of depression, no signs of anxiety,” which Li submitted as evidence to the court. She says that if further judicial evaluations are required, she will seek them outside of Jiangxi—perhaps in Beijing or Shanghai.
One piece of news gives her some hope: a previous case involved someone trying to shed a “schizophrenia” label and winning a lawsuit against Jiangxi Provincial Psychiatric Hospital.
A Precedent
In December 2008, a Nanchang man named Wan Yousheng (万友生) was forcibly admitted to Jiangxi Provincial Psychiatric Hospital. The day after, due to his mother’s strong objections, he left. However, in his discharge summary, the hospital diagnosed him with “schizophrenia.” Wan then filed a lawsuit against the hospital.
Following a first trial, a retrial, and a second trial, the Nanchang Intermediate People’s Court found that the hospital’s procedures for admitting Wan were improper but did not rule on the correctness of the “schizophrenia” diagnosis. Wan filed another appeal. On August 2, 2018, the Jiangxi Provincial High Court determined that because the hospital had not conducted the necessary tests or provided any treatment, diagnosing him with schizophrenia in the discharge summary “clearly lacked evidence and did not meet clinical standards.”
This translation is an independent yet well-intentioned effort by the China Thought Express editorial team to bridge ideas between the Chinese and English-speaking worlds. The original text is available here:
https://www.backchina.com/news/2024/12/16/948590.html
Kindly attribute the translation if referenced.
sad and shit like that happens in the USA too. There are bad cops everywhere and people get thrown into mental hospitals for vengeance and politics anywhere. I really hope she gets fair treatment. The great majority of cops are good, there are bad cops everywhere.
They don't usually have long careers.
Thanks for your comments