Mother Jones; Steven Freeman; Duke University Press

When police kill someone, a medical examiner lists their cause of death—which plays a significant role in whether a police officer will be held accountable.

Some of those determinations shield the police from potential accountability: notably, “excited delirium,” a so-called syndrome not recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or the International Classification of Diseases, with research finding that most deaths attributed to the term involve aggressive restraint.

Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, a professor of American studies at Princeton University, traces the history of “excited delirium” in a new book, Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease—and calls it a “very useful tool that has allowed medical examiners to participate in these cover-ups.”

Beliso-De Jesús spoke to me about the racist and xenophobic views behind the term, the devastating impact of its pseudoscience on the families of the deceased, and what has to be done to move forward.

Forensic pathologist Charles Wetli first used the concept of “excited delirium” in dismissing the deaths of Black sex workers in the 1980s; they were later found to have been murdered by a serial killer. Does the term’s origin speak to its being dehumanizing?

Medical diagnoses are supposed to be helpful to people. But as we can see in the example of excited delirium, and specifically with the misdiagnosis of the cases that you’re referring to—the misdiagnosis of Black women who were strangled to death, murdered and raped by a serial killer—which Charles Wetli described as “cocaine sex deaths,” this horrific term was really used for him to substantiate his........

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