Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease

Charles Wetli identified "excited delirium syndrome" in 1980, which was used to justify police violence against Black and Brown communities. Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús examines this fabricated diagnosis and its use to erase police violence, exposing its flawed diagnostic criteria and inextricable ties to the criminalization of Afro-Latiné religions.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 06 August 2024
Publisher: Duke University Press

Charles Wetli, a Miami-based medical examiner and self-proclaimed "cult expert" of Afro-Caribbean religions, identified what he called "excited delirium syndrome" in 1980. Medical examiners began using the syndrome regularly to describe the deaths of Black men and women during interactions with police, claiming that Black people with so-called excited delirium exhibited superhuman strength induced from narcotics abuse. However, it was fatal heart failure that killed them, not forceful police restraints. In her book Excited Delirium, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús examines this fabricated medical diagnosis and its use to justify and erase police violence against Black and Brown communities. She outlines the flawed diagnostic criteria of excited delirium syndromes and demonstrates their inextricable ties to the criminalization of Afro-Latiné religions. Beliso-De Jesús shows that it is yet another example of the systemic racism that pervades law enforcement, in which the culpability for state violence is shifted from the state onto its victims. By doing so, she furthers understanding of the complex layers of medicalized state-sanctioned violence against people of color in the United States.

Weight: 468g
Dimension: 228 x 152 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781478030553