On Wednesday, Feb. 19, Dr. Aisha Beliso-De Jesús gave the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies 2025 Black History Month Keynote Lecture in the Campus Center. The lecture, co-sponsored by the anthropology, political science, legal studies and STEPC departments along with the Center for Multicultural Advancement and Student Success, focused on the concept of “excited delirium,” a condition listed as a cause of death with no medical basis.

“We are gathered here [Wednesday] in the midst of what are very challenging times, and for departments like our own, for our larger universities, but also for Black, Brown, LGBTQ+ and other marginalized communities across the country,” Yolanda Covington-Ward, chair of the Afro-American Studies department, said.

“We are trying to push forward with our work and with our commitment to centering the voices and experiences of people of African descent, even as oppositional forces try to legislate us away and to silence us. But we will not be silent,” Covington-Ward said.

Beliso-De Jesús is the Olden Street Professor of American Studies and co-director of the Center for Transnational Policing at Princeton University. Her new book, “Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease,” was the subject of the talk.

Excited delirium is said to be characterized by an agitated state, due to drug usage. The condition is no longer recognized by the American Medical Examiners Association and the Emergency Room Physicians Association, and the American Medical Association explicitly opposes the diagnosis and the use of ketamine to treat it.

The concept, “started in the 1980s and used mostly to identify deaths by mostly by Black and Latino men who died in police custody,” Beliso-De Jesús said.

“Excited delirium is not [just] a syndrome that is a death classification,” Beliso-De Jesús said. “Excited delirium is the white gaze that criminalizes Black and Brown people, and that is a form of social delirium.”

The use of the term excited delirium, and the general phenomena of the justification of police force in response to agitation blamed on alleged drug use, is seen in the deaths of Elijah McClaine, George Floyd, Mario Woods, Frank Tyson and Keenan Anders. Since 2020, California and Colorado have banned the term as a medical diagnosis, and Florida has struck the term from training documents.

Beliso-De Jesús outlined the term’s origins stemming from Miami-Dade Medical Examiner Charles Wetli’s incorrect claims, that “Black people in particular [are] predisposed to go crazy on cocaine.”

According to Beliso-De Jesús, Wetli “claimed that a number of Black women who were found dead in Miami, he argued, died from a theory of his theory of racial genetics … During a reexamination … all of the cases were overturned, and it was determined that it was not cocaine [or] sex deaths, but rather … a serial killer who was murdering women in Miami.”

However, Wetli continued his claims, and they became influential, with medical examiners across the country beginning to use the term. According to Beliso-De Jesús, police and paramedics across the country are often still trained to identify excited delirium.

“I was preparing to interview Jade Ellis, an Afro-Latina [transgender woman] and activist in Los Angeles, California … when I became engrossed in this death classification called excited delirium syndrome,” Beliso-De Jesús said.

“[Ellis] explained that her father, Jeremy Ellis, had stolen a car and the police had begun pursuit … she was told that during this incident, his heart suddenly stopped, causing the car to crash on the freeway.”

“I stopped taking notes,” Beliso-De Jesús continued, “and I looked up at her, stunned. Hesitantly, I asked her, ‘do you know if the cause of death was excited delirium syndrome?’ Jade slowly nodded her head. ‘How did you know?’”

Researching the topic for her book took a toll on Beliso-De Jesús. “We’re still expected to kind of perform a sort of distance from our research,” Beliso-De Jesús said. “I became deeply traumatized by the research itself, and I was haunted by the spirits labeled excited delirium, who forced me to reckon with the violence of the research itself on my own self.”

Beliso-De Jesús said she “turn[ed] to my family and to my own cultural healing practices in attempt to forge a pathway through the difficult material of the book.”

The book includes “ethnographic journal entries” that try to bring her own experiences with the “spirits” into the narrative. “I wanted to make sure that they had the place in this text,” Beliso-De Jesús said.

“I want to … say thank you for that important, valuable work,” Agustin Lao-Montes said to Beliso-De Jesús during the Q&A. “Even within the decolonial world, the decolonial critique, what you’re doing is something unique and very courageous, and the fact that you have been able to open those spaces, first in Harvard Divinity School and then in Princeton, etcetera, this is something admirable.”

The talk was followed by a signing of Beliso-De Jesús’ book.

Daniel Frank can be reached at [email protected]