About

Between 2018 and 2025, this site housed a suite of plain language rights materials meant to (a) help people who were involuntarily hospitalized under British Columbia’s Mental Health Act better understand their rights and (b) help clinicians understand the role that rights can play in a person’s treatment and recovery and more effectively communicate rights information to the people in their care.

The rights materials on this site were created by the Mental Health Act Rights Advice (MHARA) research team, which formed in fall 2017 at Simon Fraser University (SFU). The team consisted of:

  • two patient partners with lived experience of involuntary hospitalization,
  • a psychiatric clinical nurse educator, and
  • mental health and knowledge translation researchers at SFU and the University of British Columbia.

This project was motivated by a survey commissioned by the Ministry of Health, where 43% of respondents who had been certified as involuntary patients reported that they had not been told their rights in a way they could understand.

This patient-oriented research team’s mandate was to:

  • create a suite of Mental Health Act rights communication tools based on input from previous patients about their information needs at the time of involuntary hospitalization,
  • test these materials with previous patients and use their feedback to refine the communication tools, and
  • introduce these materials to clinicians so that they can be used in hospitals.

The final suite of communication tools included the following:

  • a rights pamphlet,
  • a rights card,
  • two rights posters: a simple, small poster and a larger, more detailed poster, and
  • a video.

The materials were reviewed for legal accuracy by a lawyer with expertise in mental health law. They also met the criteria of the Patients Included charter.

Thanks to funding from the Legal Services Society, the research team was able to have the pamphlet, wallet card, and video captions translated into several languages:

  • Arabic,
  • Chinese (simplified and traditional),
  • Farsi/Persian,
  • Korean,
  • Punjabi,
  • Spanish, and
  • Vietnamese.

This work was funded by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research and Michael Smith Health Research BC. The team was coordinated by Iva Cheung, who at the time was completing her PhD at SFU. Her dissertation about this project is available through SFU Library.

After these materials were made available, they were formally adopted for use at Vancouver Coastal Health, Providence Health Care, and Island Health, and the team received requests for materials from health care providers from Northern Health, Interior Health, and several mental health nonprofit organizations. The materials formed the basis of a staff training program developed at Providence Health Care and available through LearningHub. The team’s advocacy increased the Ministry of Health’s awareness of the need for plain language rights materials.

Since this project concluded, several initiatives have increased the accessibility of mental health rights information in the province. One is the Independent Rights Advice Service (IRAS), which employs rights advisors who are not affiliated with the Ministry of Health or health authorities to give people who have been involuntarily hospitalized information about their rights under the Mental Health Act and help them exercise those rights. IRAS has developed an up-to-date suite of information tools that replaces the ones previously available on this site. Another is the Ministry of Health’s updates to Mental Health Act Forms 13.1 and 14.1, which have been designed to use clearer language and look less intimidating than the previous rights information forms. The MHARA research team applauds these developments and would like to believe that their work has informed these positive changes.

Because these shifts have rendered the MHARA research team’s rights materials out of date, as of December 2025, this site will no longer be updated or maintained. The rights information materials have been archived and can be requested from Iva Cheung for research purposes. Please contact IRAS for up-to-date rights information.

The team thanks the many contributors to this work—including Jonathon Dalton for his illustrations, Christopher Young for creating the rights information video, and Stéphanie Roy for infographic inspiration—as well as the people at IRAS, the Ministry of Health, and the province’s health authorities who are carrying this work forward.