A supposedly life-threatening syndrome whose victims are said to exhibit wild behavior and extreme strength has been cited by police and paramedics in the deaths of suspects in police custody, including in the killing of George Floyd. It’s called “excited delirium” and was found in a 2018 review of studies and articles referencing it to be associated with more than 10% of deaths in police custody. But the condition is not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association or the American Medical Association. John Dickerson investigates the controversial syndrome on the next edition of 60 Minutes, Sunday, December 13 at 7 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.
Dickerson speaks to Dr. Paul Appelbaum for his report, who oversees changes to psychiatry’s main diagnostic manual. Appelbaum contends excited delirium is bad science, based on faulty studies that grew out of the 1980’s cocaine epidemic.
The report contains an interview with Adams County District Attorney Dave Young who investigated the death of 23-year-old Elijah McClain, who died last year after a police encounter in Aurora, Colorado. In the autopsy, the county coroner concluded the cause of McClain’s death was undetermined because he may have died from a host of possible causes, including excited delirium. And that possibility, Young says, convinced him he could not win a homicide case against the officers.
Dickerson also interviews McClain’s mother, Sheneen, and another mother, Barb Johnson, whose son Max was put on a ventilator for two days after an encounter with police in Minneapolis in July. In both cases, the drug ketamine was administered, a powerful anesthetic increasingly used to treat excited delirium and severe agitation.
Joe Baker, a former paramedic in Woodbury, Minnesota, is also interviewed by Dickerson and expresses his concern about an overreliance on ketamine as a means to ending difficult police encounters Baker resigned from his job and filed a whistleblower’s lawsuit after refusing to inject a man suffering a mental health crisis with the drug after he alleges police told him to do so.
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