Minnesota Becomes Third State to Restrict ‘Excited Delirium’
by Jordan Arizmendi
On May 24, 2024, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, signed a law prohibiting police officers from being trained about “excited delirium,” a widely rejected diagnosis characterized by a state of extreme agitation and delirium. The diagnosis frequently appears in the postmortem of young adult Black males, who happened to be physically restrained by police at the time of their death.
Minnesota is the third state to restrict the use of excited delirium. California prohibits it as a cause of death, and Colorado bans the use of the term in official documents such as police and autopsy reports.
Excited delirium is not recognized by mainstream medicine, nor is it listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or the International Classification of Diseases. The alleged syndrome is also not recognized by the World Health Organization, American Psychiatric Association, American Medical Association, or National Association of Medical Examiners. Despite the fact that excited delirium is listed as a factor in autopsy reports in at least 276 deaths that followed law enforcement use of a taser, according to a 2017 Reuters report, excited delirium is generally regarded as “junk science.” After the deaths of George Floyd and Elijah McClain, in 2021, the American Medical Association issued a statement that characterized excited delirium as “a manifestation of systemic racism.”
Dr. Altaf Saadi, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital said, “Right now, there’s not a single medical association that upholds excited delirium as legitimate.”
Rep. Jessica Hanson (DFL-Burnsville) introduced the bill by describing excited delirium as a diagnosis “rooted in anti-Black racism.” She also said that, “It has no basis in science, no functional meaning in medicine and no clear diagnostic criteria nor symptomatology.”
Source: denverpost.com, yahoo.com
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