Authorities claimed these Black men had excited delirium just before they died. But the diagnosis itself is a problem and should be abandoned, a new study says

CNN — In videos that show George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis police custody, an officer holding down the Black man’s ankles says, “I just worry about excited delirium or whatever.” Another officer responds: “That’s why we have the ambulance coming.” But Floyd did not meet any of the 10 criteria used by many to diagnose “excited delirium,” a police surgeon testified later in the murder trial of the second officer, Derek Chauvin. But a new study from doctors at Harvard, the University of Michigan and Massachusetts General Hospital, as well as civil rights lawyers, says the term excited delirium is “scientifically meaningless” and has become a “catch-all for deaths occurring in the context of law enforcement restraint, often coinciding with substance use or mental illness, and disproportionately used to explain the deaths of young Black men in police encounters.” Indeed, a case that helped cement the term’s widespread use unfairly targeted Black people. Medical groups don’t recognize police term The problem with “excited delirium” goes deeper than the phrase itself, said Dr. Michele Heisler, medical director of Physicians for Human Rights, a co-author of the study and a professor of public health and internal medicine at the University of Michigan. It is not part of our training, and it is certainly not part of our ethics or our values.” After an outcry over the term excited delirium in 2020, even the American College of Emergency Physicians – whose definition remains the industry standard – has tried to shift its language in new studies to “‘hyperactive delirium.” “We recognize the term ‘excited delirium’ is increasingly being used in non-clinical medicine discussions and the term can produce a visceral and negative response, particularly among those in communities with complicated relationships with law enforcement or medicine,” a spokesperson for the group told CNN in statement. I mean, are we expecting doctors?” Getting mental health experts to emergency calls The Physicians for Human Rights report’s main recommendation is to nix the use of the term “excited delirium” altogether – erasing it from training manuals and autopsy reports – and encouraging medical associations that haven’t done so to issue statements discouraging its use among their members.