Black people in the UK are more likely to be diagnosed with psychosis, less likely to receive treatment, and seven times more likely than white people to be killed by police restraint. For decades, research has confirmed that Black people in the UK, particularly those in mental health crises, suffer police violence at a higher rate than other groups.

In many UK-based cases of deaths in police restraint, the terms ‘Excited Delirium’ or ‘Acute Behavioural Disturbance’ (ABD) have been cited as a cause of death or contributing factor. But what is known about these conditions?

ABD superseded ‘Excited Delirium’, the origins of which are widely discredited as racist pseudo-science. Neither term features in internationally recognised medical standards for diseases or mental health conditions. To this day, symptoms of ABD reflect the racialised symptoms of ‘Excited Delirium’ including ‘superhuman strength’ or being ‘impervious to pain’, which themselves have been said to echo colonial ‘race science’.

Unlearning ‘Excited Delirium’, funded by the Wellcome Trust, brings an interdisciplinary team to bear on this issue, combining advanced spatial analysis and visual forensics with statistics, medico-legal research, history, and sociology.

New investigations and research will seek to better assess the role of restraint in fatal police encounters, interrogate policies and practices, and trace the racist legacy and enduring influence of ‘Excited Delirium’ on its UK inheritor, ‘Acute Behavioural Disturbance’.

Building on the success of Tottenham Rights and Forensic Architecture’s exhibition War Inna Babylon at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts, Unlearning ‘Excited Delirium’ will culminate in a major exhibition, which will play host to talks, film screenings, video investigations, community commissions, guided tours and educational visits, seeking to change narratives and drive lasting social change in response to an urgent crisis of public health, human rights, and racial and social justice.