Speaking

Louis was the featured speaker at a day-long workshop for health care professionals sponsored by the Amelia Center in Birmingham, Alabama which serves bereaved families from all over the state. His emphasis was on cutting edge approaches to the sensitive problem of helping parents who lose children.

Louis spoke to his colleagues in the Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC) at their annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia about some of the clinical cases he has handled in the course of providing grief therapy as a professional psychologist. Louis’s expertise was acknowledged when he received ADEC’s Clinical Practice Award in 2008.

Louis presented a full-day workshop to the Minnesota Coalition for Death Education and Support (MCDES) in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Coalition represents a cross-section of health care professionals from the Twin Cities area involved in end-of-life care, hospice, grief counseling, and death education.

As a Professor affiliated with the Texas A&M College of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Science, Louis regularly presents to his departmental colleagues on his specialty work in dying, death, and bereavement. As more states legalize medically-assisted dying, clinicians often face difficult choices of conscience about whether and how much to be involved in such deliberations.

In this workshop held in the Kresge Chapel at Claremont School of Theology in Claremont, California, Louis led attendees through a review of current best practices in the care of dying patients, then explored how the landscape of end-of-life decision-making has changed with the passage of the End of Life Option Act in California in 2015. California law permits practitioners to follow their conscience in deciding whether to participate in medically-assisted deaths.

Louis spoke to staff and friends of Glendale Memorial Hospital/Dignity Health in Glendale, California about the importance of death competence as a professional attribute when working with dying patients and their families. Clarifying one’s personal value system is important given the legalization of medically-assisted dying in the state of California.

At the annual conference of the Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC) in Portland, Oregon, Louis participated in a symposium that focused on how individual health care professionals can handle the ethical, legal, and moral implications of medically assisted dying, which is now legal in several U.S. states and Canada. He was joined by David Balk, PhD of Brooklyn College, Elizabeth Goy, PhD of Oregon Health & Science University, and Dale Larson, PhD of Santa Clara University.

Louis was the keynote speaker for the annual Darrel Neal Memorial Seminar hosted by University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton. This full-day workshop for health care professionals promoted best practices in care of dying patients and bereaved families, including consideration of Canada’s national medical assistance in dying law.

Louis delivered a keynote address on the psychological aspects of sibling grief at the 10th Biennial Scott & White Bereavement Conference held on the campus of Baylor Scott & White Health in Temple, Texas. Louis founded the Scott & White Bereavement Conferences in 1997 and received an endowment in 2000 from the Texas-based Volney A. Acheson Fund to permanently underwrite the conferences.

Based on nearly 20 years of experience evaluating applicants seeking to be ordained as permanent deacons in the Catholic Church, as well as his treatment of troubled and impaired clergy, Louis addressed the National Association of Deacon Directors (NADD) at its annual meeting in Houston, Texas. Louis discussed how psychological examinations are conducted and how they can inform the selection process determining who enters diaconate training.

On the 40th anniversary of the Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC), Louis delivered the keynote address at the group’s annual meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His address celebrated the association’s accomplishments to date and envisioned how health care professionals and educators can continue to constructively influence how society deals with death and its repercussions.

Louis served as the 2015 International Educator of the Australian Centre for Grief and Bereavement. Louis travelled to three different cities on Australia’s east coast—Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney—to conduct consecutive full-day workshops on current best practices in grief counseling and care of people who are dying. Workshop content was based on the professional literature and illustrated with video examples of Louis’s clinical work.

Louis delivered a presentation at the annual conference of the Texas Psychological Association in Dallas, Texas during which he challenged attendees to consider how they would clinically approach a patient near death. A video interview was shown in sequential segments, allowing participants to consider how they might conceptualize the patient’s concerns and which theory or method would inform their therapeutic response.

Louis conducted two workshops at Fort Hood, Texas as part of the U.S. Army’s Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), which serves bereaved spouses and families of military personnel who die on active duty. TAPS is a national nonprofit organization that provides free bereavement services to families of warriors who have made the ultimate sacrifice.