Maybe it has something to do with the presence of an armed uniformed person shouting at you to obey orders or else holy hell? Or choking you? Or pressing your lungs into the ground?
How would that not be critical to diagnose what a distressed person is experiencing?
Your model of what is happening is that police approach a calm man and tell him to lay down on the ground, and he panics, rips his clothes off, starts running around, and making guttural noises?
What should police do when confronted by a person acting in such a way?
It’s not a term that we use in the ERs I’ve worked in.
I’ve restrained many people who were psychotic, or loaded, or both. On the one hand, I’ve never been involved with a pt who died in restraints, OTOH, we can sedate them relatively quickly. On the one hand, we have superior monitoring capability than someone on the street, OTOH, I can’t remember the last time I had a close call and said ‘thank goodness I had superior monitoring capability or something bad might have happened.’
In my opinion, which is based entirely on my opinion, the term “excited delirium” is a police term of art, which is used primarily in cases of “whoops, just killed this guy”.
It goes along with another one; “I was afraid for my life”, which is used by police in shooting cases, where they killed a guy who was 50 feet away and wielding a comb, or was running away.
Here in Vancouver, it was used by the RCMP when they killed a man who was waving an office stapler at them from a distance. The officer seriously stated under oath that he was “afraid for his life”. The RCMP then lied some more on the stand, and tried to suppress video evidence. The officer that killed the man was subsequently found guilty of perjury and colluding with his fellow officers.
I am aware that it doesn’t support your case, no matter how much you want to repeat it, especially the ‘heart literally explodes’ nonsense. “People sometimes get violent and combatitve” is not under debate here, and no one really cares if you call that ‘excited delirium’. But the whole idea that it is an independently occuring syndrome that just happens and can be cited as a cause of death to rule out any blame going to the actions of police is what is relevant here, and you haven’t supported that claim. And nothing explains why the ONLY cases of people dying from ‘excited delirium’ (including the exploding hearts) ever seem to happen in police custody.
The wikipedia page also cites articles disputing that it is an actual cause of death, and the medical cites that I looked at talk about it in the form of ‘person agitated and combative’ (which no one is disputing happens) and not addressing the ‘person had this condition, and this condition definitely killed them and certainly not the police restraints, chemical weapon use, electrical weapon use, and other techniques’.
When the cops are trying to claim that ‘excited delirium’ is the cause of death rather than NINE MINUTES of keeping a neck on a man’s neck, damn right they’re going to get picked on. If you don’t want to get ‘picked on’ by having people not accept your outlandish and unsupported claims (literal heart explosion) or ponder the strange coincidence of a medical condition that only kills people in police custody, absolving the police of any responsibility, maybe refrain from the outlandish and unsupported claims.
This is completely and utterly irrelevant to the question at hand, and is deliberate appeal to emotion rather than an attempt to deal with the facts of the alleged diagnosis. Also note that in the case that started this discussion, the person supposedly suffering from ‘excited delirium’ to the point of death was already restrained by police, wearing clothing, not raving like an animal, not attacking anyone, and the only property he was alleged to have damaged is the ground he fell on.
Why do people keep bringing up how the guy getting EXD is naked? Has any medical authority brought up a connection between getting EXD and how much clothing a person is wearing?
It’s part of the m.o. of excited delirium as opposed to other psychotic breaks. The subject almost always tears their clothes off because they feel like they are burning up. The subject is also is usually sweating in buckets which makes trying to control them even harder as they are slippery as all hell.
Yes, as a matter of fact they have. The review article that I cited above (post #13) has evidence from a couple of studies showing “Inappropriately clothed, removal of clothing” as a factor in 60-70 percent of cases.
You know, I don’t usually get grumpy when people ignore citations on this message board, but I’m about the only person in this conversation to link, quote extensively from, and also explain some of the key findings in actual academic studies of this phenomenon, and people on both sides of the debate seem content to opine away in this thread without actually considering what the studies have to say.
Have at it, by all means, but I think I’m done.
I don’t suppose you have a cite that this happens almost always when it comes to “excited delirium” claims?
Why is this my model? Are all of the cases like this?
See post #48, which makes this claim without providing a cite.
Okay, that’s a fair point.
I read the article in question and one thing the authors repeatedly note is that there is no clear definition of what EXD is.
So we have a medical condition where there’s a lot of gray area over what the condition is, who has it, and who doesn’t. It appears doctors have a lot of leeway on when they diagnose EXD. The authors of this paper - who believe the condition exists - read through various reports of people who were diagnosed as having EXD and tried to determine what criteria led to the diagnosis.
There was a correlation with people taking off their clothes. (60 or 70% as you noted.)
There was also a correlation with people taking drugs, as some here have surmised. But the correlation was generally weak and widely variable. The correlation between cocaine use with an EXD diagnosis, for example (which was the most commonly cited drug correlation) ranged from 6% to 83% depending on which study was used.
But here’s something that will bring us back on topic. Two studies checked on the correlation between being involved in “Police noncompliance, combative” and being diagnosed with EXD. One study found a 74% correlation and the other found a 90% correlation. (A third study noted there was a correlation but didn’t provide a percentage.) So it appears that one of the surest ways to get diagnosed with EXD is to fight with the police.
Whats the stats on folks undergoing “Excited Delerium” dying while being restrained by EMTs, Nurses, and Doctors?
Fair enough. I am going off years of in-service training I have received on the subject, which I fully realize doesn’t hold much weight without an actual cite to link to. I wanted to link to some training vids, one that included a cardiac surgeon that explained the effects on the heart during these episodes. But they appear on the restricted portion of WILENET and nobody but Wisconsin LEOs would be able to view them. So I could only post a link to the videos that are available online and they are not as good.
Let’s face it, there are those on these boards convinced that all cops are routinely and intentionally killing people and nothing will convince them otherwise.
It wouldn’t matter if you did post those videos, as they’re not actual medical research on the phenomenon of Excited Delirium. I don’t think anyone here is disputing that police training talks about ‘Excited Delirium’, that’s certainly not what this thread is about, and that’s all that showing police training videos would demonstrate.
Let’s face it, there are those on these boards that can’t stand that people want hard facts and evidence instead of police training videos designed to reinforce a common explanation that cops use when someone ‘just happens’ to die in police custody. And who will make up absurd strawmen like ‘all cops are routinely and intentionally killing people’ rather than engage in real debate. With what we’ve seen in the last week, with police deploying chemical weapons against children, gassing peaceful protestors, destroying medical facilities, directly attacking medics and their patients, and defending that and all of the other on video, and considering that the protests were in response to what is clearly an outright murder by cops, it’s really pretty absurd to act like skepticism of police tactics, training, and defenses is some weird, unwarranted position.
And there are some people convinced that the police are never in any way responsible for a suspect’s death. Even if they were actively choking him at the time he died, it was just a coincidence because the real cause of his death was a completely unrelated medical condition that he had brought upon himself by doing a lot of drugs and taking his clothes off.
Not even broad-brush over-exaggerations of their opinions by others? I’m shocked.
If police are killing people with heart attacks (as opposed to beating or choking someone to death, say), it’s probably worth studying what is physiologically happening in those cases, in my opinion. Whether you call it “excited delirium” or “bad policeman heart attack murder syndrome” doesn’t really matter to me.
Note that what prompted this thread was the general mention of ‘Excited Delirium’ in regards to the George Floyd murder, and a specific post on this board where a former cop talked about how Excited Delirium Syndrome was a real thing and how it might be the cause of Floyd’s death - even though the only evidence of ‘Excited Delirium’ was that Floyd might have been fighting with the officers during the time where he wasn’t on video and that he was ‘resisting arrest’ by collapsing to the ground. The fact that ‘subject might have possibly been fighting police at some point’ was enough for him to bring up “Excited Delirium” even though other symptoms (like high body temperature and removing clothes) weren’t present gave me pause. For all the talk of things like high body temperature, psychotic behavior, and taking off clothes here, it seems like in practice ‘Excited Delirium’ can be diagnosed if a person ‘resists’ cops by collapsing from medical issues, which really makes the diagnosis suspect.