Freida H. Outlaw, DNSc, RN, CS
Associate Professor of Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing Philadelphia, PA
Dr. Outlaw is certified by the American Nurses Association Credentialing Center as a Clinical Specialist in Adult Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing. She has received extensive post-masters training in family therapy, play therapy and sand tray therapy. At the core of her academic activities, clinical practice, teaching and research is her commitment to the advancement of an urban agenda which has as its impetus the improvement of mental health and well-being for poor, urban people of color, with a special emphasis on children, adolescents, and single mothers.
She teaches primarily core courses, "Clinical Modalities," in the graduate Psychiatric-Mental Health Nursing Program, co-coordinate the Psychopharmacology course, and a course that examines health care issues related to race, ethnicity, culture and gender. As a clinician educator, Dr. Outlaw mentors undergraduate and graduate students in their clinical practicum at the Health Annex, the primary health care center operated by the University of Pennsylvania's School of Nursing, and in an urban elementary school in a funded behavioral health program.
Dr. Outlaw's research agenda is directly connected to her commitment to a community-based urban agenda enhancing the mental health and well-being of low-income urban people of color. She has been funded to study the meaning of prayer for persons with a cancer diagnosis, a funded study describing whether, and if so how a mother's religious teachings impact on the sexual beliefs and behaviors of their adolescent sons. With her psychiatric mental health colleagues, she is also studying the prevalence of depression in a group of women seeking primary health care services at the University of Pennsylvania Health Annex. In addition, she is studying a similar problem in the elderly, the prevalence and risk factors for depressive symptoms in older, poor, urban African Americans. Presently, Dr. Outlaw is working with a team of educational psychologists and adolescent physicians studying resilience and coping in high achieving and low achieving urban, low-income adolescents from the same neighborhoods as well as an adolescent violence reduction study with a population treated in the emergency room, as a result of an injury obtained in a fight. As a clinician educator family therapist, she has provided expertise as Co-PI to several HIV/AIDS studies.
She was elected to the American Family Therapy Academy and received the practice award from the Pennsylvania Nurses Association and the Women of Color Faculty Award in 2001 respectively.