‘Excited Delirium’, acute behavioural disturbance, death and diagnosis

In the 1980s the traditional Hippocratic term excited delirium was transplanted from the bedsides of febrile, agitated and disoriented patients to the streets of Miami. Deaths in custody of young men who were intoxicated with cocaine and who were restrained by the police because of their erratic or violent behaviour were attributed to excited delirium. The blood concentrations of cocaine in these subjects were approximately ten times lower than the lethal level and other factors which might have contributed to the fatal outcome, such as the police use of neck-holds, choke-holds or ‘hog-tying’, were relegated to a minor role compared with the reframed ‘diagnosis’ of excited delirium. Over the course of the next few decades ‘excited delirium’ might be applied to virtually any highly agitated person behaving violently in a public place and who subsequently died in custody while being restrained or shortly afterwards. Expert witnesses, mainly forensic pathologists, testified that the deceased's death was probably inevitable given the perilous nature of excited delirium, even though this diagnostic entity lacked any consistent neuropathological basis and depended entirely on observed behaviour. This history of the rise and fall of this disputed diagnosis is a partial response to the sociologist Phil Brown's 1995 paper asking who benefits, or at least avoids trouble, by the identification and use of a diagnosis.