Just off the train from Beijing and headed for the station exit, he was hit on the back of the head, dragged into a white vehicle and driven to the Shanghai Mental Health Center.

Men in white coats are throwing sane & insane people into mental hospital

"I was knocked out by some unknown people and when I awoke, I was already in an ambulance and on the way," says Zhou Mingde, 53.

April 23, 2008 was just the beginning of Zhou's personal voyage into territory more familiar to readers of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Without proper procedures, Zhou claims he was then locked in a sickroom and forced to receive medical "treatment" for three weeks: mostly daily medicine that made his heart beat faster.

Later he was told his wife Xie Jinghua had signed a contract with the hospital citing Zhou's "strange behavior".

What Xie really wanted was a divorce, says the couple's son Zhou Yu.

"My father always suspected my mother was having an affair, interrogated her and even beat her up," Zhou Yu says.

His lawyer and brother repeatedly went to the hospital demanding Zhou's release, but hospital authorities insisted their hands were tied: only the party who paid to send Zhou to hospital could release him, according to Shanghai mental health regulations.

Xie was nowhere to be found for two months.

"I felt desperate in that sickroom for a long time and I even wrote a last will in case I didn't get out of there," Zhou says.

Persistence paid off: Zhou's brother and lawyer finally had him released through some legal finagling that suggested he was being transferred for further medical help from other doctors.

Zhou sued. His appeal was rejected by Shanghai Changning District People's Court two years later as he could not produce sufficient medical testimony to completely prove his sanity.

Ironically, the divorce was rejected on almost the same grounds.

"Now if I do anything wrong or something they think strange, I'll be hospitalized again for the rest of my life," Zhou says.

Shocking report

On World Mental Health Day, October 10, Zhou returned to Beijing to attend the news release conference for the publication of a report by Huang Xuetao.

"I was shocked by the unreasonable current regulations and deeply worried about the drawbacks and loopholes that could be exploited to violate any citizen's basic rights," said Huang, a lawyer at the Beijing Horizon Law Firm who has been working on the issue since 2006.