Mental Hygiene Act
A Japanese law of 1950 that prohibited home confinement and required patients to be cared for in hospitals and other designated facilities. Revised in 1987, it became the Mental Health Act.
It repealed the acts of 1900 and 1919 and prohibited housing patients anywhere other than hospitals and other designated facilities[1]. It set up admission by order of the prefectural governor and admission with the consent of a family member or other person obliged to protect the patient. Both were admissions without the patient's own agreement; the idea of a patient going into hospital voluntarily did not exist in the law[2].
Under the act, psychiatric beds grew rapidly, to more than 320,000 by 1983, 87 percent of them in private hospitals[3]. Following the Utsunomiya Hospital scandal of 1984 and other cases, it was revised and became the Mental Health Act in 1987[2].
Related terms
- Home confinementUnder Japan's Mental Patients' Custody Act of 1900, the system by which families could, with official permission, lock a person with mental illness in a room at home. It was prohibited by the Mental Hygiene Act of 1950.
- Mental Patients' Custody ActJapan's first law on people with mental illness, passed in 1900. It placed the duty of looking after patients on their families and allowed them to confine patients with official permission.
- Mental Health ActA Japanese law of 1987 that revised and renamed the Mental Hygiene Act. It introduced admission based on the patient's own consent (voluntary admission) and Psychiatric Review Boards.
- Voluntary admissionAdmission to a psychiatric hospital on the basis of the patient's own consent. In Japan it first entered the law with the Mental Health Act of 1987.
Sources
- Japan, “精神衛生法 (Mental Hygiene Act), Act No. 123 of 1 May 1950, text as enacted,” House of Representatives of Japan (1950).
- E. Totsuka, “The history of Japanese psychiatry and the rights of mental patients,” Psychiatric Bulletin 14(4), 193–200 (1990).
- T. W. Harding, J. Schneider, H. M. Visotsky, G. L. Graves, “Human Rights and Mental Patients in Japan: Report of a Mission on behalf of the International Commission of Jurists and the International Commission of Health Professionals,” Geneva: International Commission of Jurists (1986).