As Righted By The Patient

Cindy Zhao

 
 

Author’s note: Form 13 of the British Columbia Mental Health Act is presented to individuals upon involuntary psychiatric admission. It functions to inform them of their rights.

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“The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, had been established only on the basis of such a silence.”

— Michel Foucault, 1965

FORM 13
MENTAL HEALTH ACT

NOTIFICATION TO INVOLUNTARY PATIENT
OF RIGHTS UNDER THE MENTAL HEALTH ACT
as Righted by the Patient, 2025.

You have the right:

  1. To receive care in this facility. You may be escorted by a security guard to the locked unit under a HIGH AWOL RISK sign. In your mint pajamas and non-slip socks, you may be asked in front of the group to specify in detail how you cut yourself. Mounted in the corner, the TV plays behind shatter-proof glass. None of the others look up.

  2. To be regularly assessed. The nurse may take you into an INTERVIEW ROOM. She tells you the cut you made last night was a suicide attempt. It wasn’t, you say; you only wouldn’t have minded if you had died. She says, so it was, and the menstrual pad you taped over it “looks like a MEPORE but okay.” You may get forty-two sutures and a blood transfusion. You may get two hours of sleep.

  3. To be intubated, catheterized, and restrained. You hang yourself after a week on the unit and are resuscitated by protocol. You wake to a flood of hands over your chest, your hips, your strapped legs. You may hear an awful groaning. Realize it is yours. You urge your mouth to close and realize you can no longer find its location. Your mouth outruns you. Each breath is a wayward hammer at your ribs for the week that follows.

  4. To be heard. You tell the medical student that you have objections to CBT’s pragmatist epistemology. You may have twenty minutes to discuss Nietzsche, Frankl, and Foucault. The medical student laughs with you. You have the right to feel briefly rational.

  5. To be treated for your mental disorder. To treat your propensity for dishonesty, you must lift your tongue after each morning medication. You have never done this before and end up wagging your tongue at the nurse. The nurse snaps at you. This is not a game. To treat your lack of insight, you must sign this form.

You do NOT have the right:

  1. To have a pen. To have a bra. To have an extra blanket. You may have one blanket only: yellowed, suggestive of must, stiff enough it can hardly be folded. Twist it all you like. It will not form the noose.

  2. To have walls. You may be put in a glass observation room across the nursing station. You may be assigned a Patient Care Assistant as per 24-hour suicide watch. He pretends he is not recording your movements in regular increments on a mottled clipboard. This room is called the BUBBLE ROOM. It will be your home for five months coming.

  3. To use a toilet unaccompanied. The sympathetic PCAs may turn their backs to the wall, but to ensure your safety, the strict ones stare. You have been caught with your hand down your throat too many times. Of course they stare.

  4. To be more than your diagnosis. The doctor says you have Borderline Personality Disorder. The doctor says it is SEVERE. You may hear the nurses call another person A FORM 4 BPD. You may find the following in your records:

Insight: Absent.
Judgement: Absent—continues to want to kill self.

5. To leave.


____________________________  Jun 23 - Nov 8, 2023 
 patient’s signature date signed

MORE INFORMATION

REASONS FOR INVOLUNTARY ADMISSION

A medical doctor is of the opinion that
(a) you do not agree or do not recognize that you require treatment regardless
of context or consequence,
(b) you do not have the capacity to wonder if coercion is another word for care,
(c) you will never admit in quiet shame your recognition that you owe the
restraints your life,
(d) you will not comply voluntarily.

Smile at your psychiatrist. It will be charted.

You do not have a choice about staying here.¹

______________________
¹Mental Health Act, RSBC 1996, c 288, Form 13, p. 2, line 12. Direct quote.

Cindy Zhao is an undergraduate student at the University of British Columbia, where they study philosophy. Their creative nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Runestone, Paper Dragon, and elsewhere.