Judith Schwarz, RN, PhD

Judith K. Schwarz, PhD, RN, is the Clinical Director of End of Life Choices New York and was the East Coast Clinical Coordinator for Compassion & Choices. She has counseled many hundreds of patients suffering from incurable and progressive or terminal illnesses and families about end of life options. She publishes regularly in nursing and palliative care journals and is a graduate of New York University in Nursing. For years her work has focused on voluntarily stopping eating and drinking as an option to achieve a peaceful, patient-controlled death for decisionally capable and suffering patients.  More recently she began responding to requests for assistance from patients diagnosed with an early stage of dementia.  With colleagues in other disciplines she developed the End of Life Choices New York “Dementia Directive” that has been completed by hundreds of individuals.

Along with colleagues, she co-edited a recently published text by Oxford University Press entitled: Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking: A Compassionate, Widely Available Option for Hastening Death, (2021.) Edited by: Timothy Quill, Paul Menzel, Thaddeus Pope, and Judith Schwarz.