About Suzanne
Suzanne Degges-White, PhD, LCPC, LPC, LMHC, NCC, is a licensed counselor and professor at Northern Illinois University, where she chairs the Department of Counseling and Higher Education. She has counseled children, adolescents, and adults for more than twenty years and keeps a small private practice in counseling and consulting alongside her academic work.
Her clinical interests are the transitions people do not choose as much as the ones they do: grief, divorce, career changes, parenting adult children, and the slow drift or sudden break of a friendship. She has written six books on those themes, among them Toxic Friendships, Sisters and Brothers for Life, and Mothers and Daughters, and her Psychology Today column on family estrangement and adult friendship has run for more than a decade. Reporters at the BBC, NPR, the New York Times, and Time have quoted her on friendship and family relationships.
Her research covers adult development across the lifespan, with a focus on women's relationships and midlife, and she has published more than thirty peer-reviewed articles. She has led the Association for Adult Development and Aging as its president and sat on the Governing Council of the American Counseling Association. Her PhD in counseling and counselor education is from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Areas of expertise
Role at Psychology.com
Suzanne is the named reviewer for Psychology.com's relationships and family content, including pages on friendship, estrangement, and personality disorders. Pages she has personally reviewed carry a "Reviewed by" line with the date. She checks each page against current clinical guidelines and peer-reviewed research and flags anything that needs correction or added nuance.
Read our editorial policy for the full process.
Reviewed by Suzanne Degges-White on Psychology.com
Content reviewed by Suzanne Degges-White will be listed here as it is published. We only mark a page "Reviewed" when this board member has personally read it.
Selected publications and press
- Degges-White, S., and Van Tieghem, J. P. (2015). Toxic Friendships: Knowing the Rules and Dealing with the Friends Who Break Them. Rowman and Littlefield
- Degges-White, S., and Borzumato-Gainey, C. (2017). Sisters and Brothers for Life: Making Sense of Sibling Relationships in Adulthood. Rowman and Littlefield
- Degges-White, S., and Borzumato-Gainey, C. (2014). Mothers and Daughters: Living, Loving, and Learning over a Lifetime. Rowman and Littlefield
- Degges-White, S., Kepic, M., and Killam, W. (2020). Counseling the Contemporary Woman: Strategies and Interventions Across the Lifespan. Rowman and Littlefield
- Degges-White, S., and Kepic, M. (2020). Friendships, subjective age, and life satisfaction of women in midlife. Adultspan Journal, 19(1), 39-53
- Gibson, D. M., et al. (2021). Development of the counselor wellness competencies. Journal of Counselor Leadership and Advocacy