This page collects materials (slides, videos, and handouts) from conferences where I have made presentations on VSED. For a complete list of my VSED presentations, visit this page.
UK Clinical Ethics Network (June 2025)
Social Work Hospice & Palliative Care Network (April 2025)
VSED Advance Directives for Dementia: Are They Legal and Implementable? Is There a Middle Ground? at the 2025 SWHPN Annual Forum (Minneapolis, MN April 28, 2025)
This symposium features a panel of practitioner and scholar speakers, representing social work, law, and bioethics. The panel addresses challenges faced by social workers aiming to honor the increasing number of VSED advance directives for dementia.
In early October 2020, Dr. David Gruenwald and I made a two-hour presentation on VSED and SED by AD in the sixth session of the Completed Life Initiative conference series.
Washington State Medical Association (September 2019)
Physician/Advanced Practitioner Support for Voluntary Stopping of Eating and Drinking, WASHINGTON STATE MEDICAL ASSOCIATION & WASHINGTON END OF LIFE COALITION, Seattle, Washington (Sept. 13-14, 2019).
Hastening Death by Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking: Clinical, Legal, Ethical, Religious, and Family Perspectives at Seattle University (October 2016)
Check out the proceedings from this world class, two-day conference on VSED. The conference was hosted by Seattle University School of Law on October 14 and 15, 2016.
Through keynote addresses and panel discussions by clinicians, lawyers, ethicists, religious leaders, institutional administrators, and experienced family members, participants engaged in a wide range of challenging medical, legal, ethical, and caregiving issues about VSED:
Clinical findings: comfort and distress, duration, palliative supplements
Who uses VSED, for what reasons, in what circumstances
Narrative cases and family experiences
Legal questions: common law standing, statutory and regulatory inhibitions, permissible involvement of caregivers
Ethical questions: status of VSED re ‘suicide'; comparison with physician aid-in-dying and refusal of medically delivered nutrition & hydration; assistance from proxy decision makers
Religious and cultural perspectives
Dementia care: decision capacity, role of proxies, VSED by advance directive
Hospice and palliative care: normative-cultural compatibility, use in non-terminal situations
Institutional contexts: nursing home practice, abuse regulations, pre-admission understandings
