MINNEAPOLIS — Minnesota could become the next state to ban police officer training on "excited delirium," a term that has been rejected by major medical associations in recent years as pseudoscience used to justify deaths in law enforcement custody.

Police officers invoking excited delirium during fatal interactions, such as the murder of George Floyd, have generated a wave of criticism over the term's legitimacy in the United States. Since October, Colorado and California have passed laws prohibiting its use among emergency responders, and more state legislatures are poised to follow suit.

Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor-led House passed a broad public safety bill in April with a provision to ban the state's police licensing board from providing, certifying or reimbursing training on excited delirium. There is now no companion bill in the Senate, so it remains to be seen whether the ban will become law as both chambers negotiate final language in the last weeks of the session, which ends May 20.

Excited delirium usually refers to a person possessed by a potentially deadly form of agitation, sometimes abetted by drug abuse, and displaying aggressive behavior, profuse sweating, public nudity, mouth foaming and superhuman strength. In 2021, the American Medical Association released a statement opposing the diagnosis as "a manifestation of systemic racism." The American Psychiatric Association followed with a similar rejection, and the National Association of Medical Examiners now says it should never be cited as a cause of death.

"Right now, there's not a single medical association that upholds excited delirium as legitimate," said Dr. Altaf Saadi, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who has called for the end of the term's use in the United States.

Bill author Rep. Jessica Hanson, DFL-Burnsville, declined an interview request for this story. In a committee hearing in April, she described excited delirium as a diagnosis "rooted in anti-Black racism."

"The term excited delirium appeared out of thin air in Florida in the 1980s," Hanson said. "It has no basis in science, no functional meaning in medicine and no clear diagnostic criteria nor symptomatology."

Minnesota's largest police professional association has taken a neutral position on the bill, said Leslie Rosedahl, spokeswoman for the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association. In Minneapolis, Mayor Jacob Frey already has banned excited delirium in training for city police.

A doctor in Miami first used the term in 1981 to describe a drug smuggler who died after a bag of cocaine ruptured in his digestive tract. The tear sent a "flood of cocaine" into the man's body, and in the hours before he died, "his behavior became so dangerous that he had to be restrained by six hospital attendants," according to an article in the medical journal Psychology Medicine.

In the 1990s and 2000s, doctors and medical examiners began to use the term more broadly, often to describe people who died in police custody or in jails, including after the use of a stun gun.

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