Anxiety, OCD & Eating Disorder Treatment
in Boca Raton, Florida.

Boca Raton is our practice headquarters, where the Institute lives and where more of our clinicians see patients in person than anywhere else. Our founders, Drs. Zach and Allie Appenzeller, established the Institute here after years of academic and clinical practice in Houston, and brought the models they built there with them. Dr. Zach Appenzeller was Founding Director of the UTHealth Houston Center for Eating Disorders and developed the FAM Model for adolescents whose eating disorder is entangled with OCD or anxiety; he treats eating disorders and OCD across the lifespan, including treatment-resistant and complex co-occurring cases. Dr. Allie Appenzeller founded Baylor College of Medicine's ARPA School Anxiety and School Refusal Program, is Maudsley-trained in FBT, and leads perinatal and women's mental health for the practice, with ERP at every age, SPACE for anxious and school-refusing children, and PE and CPT for trauma. Dr. Natalia Levy, with three decades of clinical and program leadership, is the team's specialist in childhood oppositional, defiant, and disruptive behavior, with particular depth in ADHD, autism, and developmental differences; she also holds a New York license and sees adults for anxiety, depression, and ADHD.

That is who you meet in person. It is not the whole practice. The Evidence-Based Treatment Institute was founded to do one thing well: deliver the treatments the research supports, with fidelity, to families who have often already tried something that did not work. Every clinician on the team is a licensed psychologist with specialty training in eating disorders, OCD, anxiety, or the presentations that travel with them: Dr. Renée D. Rienecke, a Fellow of the Academy for Eating Disorders who was a study therapist and supervisor on the NIMH-funded trials that established Family-Based Treatment; Dr. Kaitlin Hill, former Clinical Supervisor of Rogers Behavioral Health's Eating Disorders Centers and psychologist at the OCD Institute of Texas; Dr. Kimberly Osborn, Postdoctoral Fellow with the Eating and Anxiety Treatment (EAT) Lab at the University of Louisville; and Dr. Eliza Lanzillo, trained in the OCD Program at Baylor College of Medicine, with a distinct specialty in self-harm and suicidality. Every one of them sees Florida patients by telehealth, and Nina Jolly mentors caregivers by video wherever they are.

For South Florida families, that means the approach academic medical centers point to, without the institutional friction: one specialist who carries the whole case, the rest of the team behind them, intensives in your own home across Palm Beach and Broward counties or over video when weekly sessions are not enough, and a clinician who answers within one business day. No "we don't quite specialize in that." Parents don't cause eating disorders, and families are not the problem to be managed. They are the most powerful resource a recovery has.

If you or someone you love is in immediate danger, please call or text 988 (the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), go to your nearest emergency room, or dial 911.