A physicians group released Wednesday’s report stating that the increasingly common diagnosis at center of high-profile police fatalities has no medical or mental basis.
Physicians for Human Rights released a 95-page report. It calls for Congress to investigate “excited Delirium” and asks professional organizations to clarify that the term is not “a valid medical diagnosis” and can’t be considered a cause for death.
The report’s authors state that the term , which authorities claim is displayed through greater strength, incoherence, and other behaviors — “cannot been disentangled from it racist and unscientific roots.”
According to the report’s authors who stated that they reviewed medical literature and court depositions and conducted two dozen interviews with mental health, law enforcement, and legal experts.
Elijah McClain (23-year-old Colorado man who died in 2019 after being placed in a chokehold by officers and given ketamine injections) and Daniel Prude who was restrained by police in Rochester, New York, died shortly after he was taken to hospital.
This report also highlighted the role played by “excited delirium”, in George Floyd’s murder. A lawyer representing former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin brought it up in his closing arguments to claim that Chauvin used objectively reasonable force to hold Floyd’s neck for over 9 minutes, according to The Associated Press.
Eric Nelson, Eric’s lawyer, stated that Chauvin was watching for signs of “excited delirium”, according to the AP.
This term was first used to describe lethal cocaine poisoning in a small group Black women, who were thought to be sex workers. The report states that later it came to rely upon “racist tropes” of Black men and other persons of color being’superhuman’ and ‘impervious’ to pain while pathologizing resistance to law enforcement.
According to the report, a researcher from the University of California, Berkeley found that 56 percent of the 166 deaths in custody that were related to the condition between 2010 and 2020 was due to Black and Latinos.
Partly, the report’s authors attributed the term’s growing popularity among law enforcement officers and forensic pathologists in recent years to researchers and experts associated with Axon (the maker of Taser stun gun).
According to the report, Axon’s lawyer and an Axon expert hosted a conference in 2007 at which attendees were instructed that they would “law enforcement, legal history, and medical history” and create a consensus on the condition.
The conference’s “results”, as described in the report, were published in a 2009 whitepaper by the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), a professional organization for emergency physicians.
The condition was described as a syndrome in the paper. It is “especially likely” in someone who has six or more of these features: pain tolerance, superhuman strength and sweating, rapid breathing and tactile hyperthermia.
ACEP has changed its disclosure requirements since the 2009 paper was published. A spokesman said that this fact was reflected in a paper about the condition last year.
Axon stated that the company did not participate in the conference’s advertising and was not aware of the process. Axon stated that none of the 19 experts who wrote the ACEP whitepaper were employees, and that three of them had been retained by Axon for specific cases.
An ACEP official stated Wednesday that the 2009 paper admitted that the condition existed, but that the official did not add that it had been “officially endorsed by” the group. The 2021 paper changed the name to hyperactive delirium.
The group released a statement Wednesday claiming that the change in language was due to an attempt to “better form consensus around the description of this condition that is more medically accurate.”
The statement stated that “excited delirium” is a term increasingly used in non-clinical medical discussions. It can cause a visceral response, especially among people in communities with complex relationships with law enforcement and medicine.
Axon stated that the condition was known by many names, including “Bell’s Mania”, and “Profound Agitation”. He also said that it has been “the subject of hundreds if no thousands of studies and publications within the medical literature over the past 150 years.”
The company stated that “expert medical professionals agree that certain individuals may collapse and die after experiencing an unusual state or agitation.”
The physicians group called Wednesday’s report on Wednesday on behalf of the National Association of Medical Examiners for clarifications on its position on “excited Delirium”.
Kathryn Pinneri, president of the association, stated in an email that the group does not support or promote the diagnosis of “excited Delirium” nor considers it to be a valid cause for death.
She said that if a person experiences acute delirium before death, then the underlying cause is the process that caused it. We agree that excited delirium does not constitute a medical diagnosis.
