Constructing Families, Contesting Paternalisms Available to Purchase

The 2013 MHL simultaneously embraces patient autonomy and family guardianship. This chapter investigates this seeming contradiction by examining not just the legislative debates but also the historically sedimented landscape of mental health care in China on which different parties have staked their claims. It shows that psychiatric discourses and social policies in different eras have variably constructed individual households or the state as paternalistic, positively and negatively, in resemblance and contrast to each other. In the mental health legislative debates, human rights activists and psychiatrists strategically invoked these constructs and scales of paternalism to either attack or defend hospitalization and to assert the right to autonomy or to (biomedical) health. In the end, both views entered the MHL because they were both contained in the ambiguous concept of risk and because the family was left to mediate the various rights and subjectivities at stake.