BUDDY LARRIER’S SUBMISSIONS at many a public forum are often dismissed as rambling nonsense.
Some people even say he is “mad”.
“Tell me something that I don’t know,” he tells critics who call him “you mad so and so”.
In his mind that “madness” is not the clinical mental condition to which others refer; rather, it is his lingering anger over actions that have left him labelled as mentally unstable and the frustration suffered throughout his ongoing struggle for certain human rights protections for others.
Larrier has spent the last 40 years crusading to prove his sanity and rooting for human rights for others that he maintains he was denied when he was placed in a mental institution in Britain against his will in 1976.
He was one of the many Barbadians who took the opportunity to go to Britain to work with the London Transport in the 1960s. But he was not prepared for the level of racism he encountered when he arrived in England in 1963 at age 20. “Racism hit us in a way that none of us who left Barbados were prepared for,” he said.
Nine years later he was back in Barbados, unable to cope with the conditions in Britain. He soon took off again for the United States where a gun-toting robber he encountered during his first week there changed his mind about staying. After just one year he returned to Britain and to his conductor’s job with the London Transport.
Larrier admits it was “a foolish thing” he did at a party that night, when, somewhat inebriated, he attempted to cut ice with a knife and ended up severing a tendon in the little finger of his right hand. This would lead to his ordeal with British authorities.
The finger injury was more severe than he realised and during recovery from surgery for a tendon graft, Larrier said he had a “revelation” that is driving his actions up to today.
“The vision was quite clear. I could see the future for the 21st century. It was like having a conversation with God.”
That same vision put him on a collision course with family when he attempted to convince his brothers and sister it was the divine signal of a need for closer family unity. They did not accept his “God talk”.
A subsequent altercation between him and his sister on a London street led to the police being called, his arrest, admission to the Lewisham General Hospital for sedation and subsequent transfer to Bexley Mental Hospital.
“When they gave me the sedative, it knocked me out, and the next thing I knew when I woke up the next day, and caught myself, when I asked, ‘Where am I?’ they told me I am in a mental institution.
“I asked the doctor what happened and he told me I was behaving strange, and ‘we are going to detain you on Section’.”
Larrier found himself compulsorily confined to a 28-day psychiatric detention under Section 25 of Britain’s 1959 Mental Health Act, even after telling the doctor he was prepared to stay in hospital of his own volition.
He did not make life any easier for himself by refusing the prescribed medication. “They told me if I did not take it in liquid or tablet form, it would be given to me through injections.”
“I knew that was going to be a fight, so I complied with their instructions.”
In a meeting with the hospital’s consultant three weeks later, he announced he was leaving.
In hindsight he says: “That was madness because they had already told me I am legal property and here I am telling them if they did not release me, I was going to go mad [meaning I would really act up in protest].
“I told the consultant that after the interview I would go outside and I was going to break every window in the hospital.”
That was a threat of folly. He had seen what was done to other patients, and for the first time the possibility of being given the electric shock treatment and the likelihood of spending an entire year institutionalised hit him.”
He was released that day.
It may have been the end of confinement for the mental illness he maintains he never had, but it was also the beginning of a life dogged with the stigma of mental illness.
He lost his job as a bus driver; his public service vehicle licence was revoked; friends shunned him; family was convinced he was indeed mad because he had been institutionalised and, worst of all, his partner, a nurse, would not leave their daughter at home alone with him.
“On release, I was not concerned about my being a black person being put in a mental hospital, but I could not work out how I could be walking the street, have an altercation with my sister, did not hurt anybody and the next hour I was locked away in a mental institution and have all my human rights taken away.”
Thus began his search for answers which eventually took him to the National Association for Mental Health. Hearing Larrier’s story, this body called in the ITV television for the interview it had long been seeking with someone who had suffered a fate such as his. He was the subject of ITV’s first documentary Patients Or Prisoners about the forced institutionalisation of someone who in truth was not mentally ill.
Two years later he was featured in a second ITV documentary Skin And Mental Health, focusing on racial bias. The two documentaries were used to bring about change in Britain’s Mental Health Act, which Larrier asserts had previously been used “to repatriate a number of black people over the years”.
Larrier has spent almost three decades seeking legal restitution for being placed in a mental institution against his will. He served on the British board of the National Association For Mental Health and aired his story in international fora – activism that he is convinced made him a wanted target on the British police list.
Such activism and associated activities would later result in his arrest and nine-month imprisonment in a British jail. Larrier headed back to Barbados within one month of his release.
Back home he continues his human rights crusade, oblivious of any ridicule.
“I continue to fight because the fight is my vision,” Larrier told the SUNDAY SUN. (GC)