Susan Kashubeck-West

Susan Kashubeck-West, Ph.D., is a professor and associate chair in the Department of Education Sciences and Professional Program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She received bachelor’s degrees in psychology and women’s studies from the University of Michigan in 1984, and a M.A. (1987), and a Ph.D. (1989) in counseling psychology from Ohio State University. 

Prior to joining the UMSL faculty in 2001, she taught psychology at Drake University (1989-1993), and she also had a small private practice, seeing clients from the Des Moines community. Susan joined the counseling psychology faculty at Texas Tech University in 1993 and remained there for eight years. She has been a licensed psychologist since 1993, and her theoretical orientation is an integration of humanistic, cognitive-behavioral, and multicultural feminist therapies. At UMSL, Susan teaches a variety of courses, including Theories of Counseling, Multicultural Counseling, Advanced Multicultural Counseling, Counseling Sexual and Gender Minorities, Doctoral Practicum in Counseling, Psychopathology and Diagnosis, Field Experience, and Research Methods in Counseling. She has won teaching awards from Drake University and Texas Tech University and has been named an outstanding faculty member in the College of Education at UMSL several times. In 2014, Susan was awarded the UMSL Trailblazer Award. 

Dr. Kashubeck-West’s research interests fall under the umbrella of multicultural issues, broadly defined. Susan is interested in discrimination and stigma related to race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, and social class and their relationships to psychological distress and well-being. In addition, she is interested in how cultural experiences might affect a person’s body image and disordered eating behavior. Her current research projects focus on microaggression experiences in the lives of sexual minority individuals; body image and eating disorders, especially as experienced by women of color, sexual minority women, and women who experience poverty or lower social class status; and relations between experiences of stigma and psychological well-being in sexual and racial minority individuals. 

Susan’s professional activities have included serving on the editorial boards of a number of journals, serving as treasurer of the Society of Counseling Psychology, serving on the American Psychological Association task force that wrote the 2012 Guidelines for Psychotherapy with Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Clients, chairing the College of Education Institutional Review Board Committee from 2004-2012, and coordinating the counseling programs. She is a member of the American Psychological Association, the American Counseling Association, and the Association for Counselor Education and Supervision.