NCID-2001
Judith Leitch
Assistant Professor of Social Work
University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Education/Degree:
1 Social Work (University of Maryland)
About
Judith Leitch, PhD, LICSW has a long-standing commitment to social justice in action and service, beginning with her undergraduate community organization leadership and curriculum development work, which led to the creation of the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins. This experience demonstrated to her the change power of collective action. Dr. Leitch's research focuses on reducing mental health disparities for people who identify as sexual and/or gender minority (SGM). As a licensed clinical social worker specializing in work with the queer and HIV positive communities and a queer person herself, Dr. Leitch has first-hand knowledge of the gaps of culturally-informed services for SGM people. She strives to ensure her work is practical, accessible, and results in a meaningful change to the field; her recent measure of competency assessment for SGM social work practice is now available on NIH's website for the Sexual and Gender Minority Research Office.
Current Work
To reduce mental health disparities for SGM people, Dr. Leitch’s research currently centers on three main goals: 1) increasing our understanding of what SGM people want from mental health providers, 2) increasing our understanding of what drives practice behaviors of mental health providers, and 3) increasing our ability to measure effective mental health practices with SGM people. Dr. Leitch will draw from the findings in this work to build an intervention that uses our knowledge of what drives practice behaviors of mental health providers to ensure that this practice with what SGM people want from mental health providers.
Research Area Keyword(s)
community-inflected, culturally-informed, Gender identity, psychotherapy, sexual orientation