Renée D. Rienecke, PhD, FAED

About Dr. Renée D. Rienecke

Launching September 8

Disobey: Finding Freedom from Your Eating Disorder — Dr. Rienecke’s new book with C. Tortolani and M. Freizinger (Hachette), written directly for teens and young adults living with an eating disorder.

I am a Licensed Clinical Psychologist with more than two and a half decades of experience specializing in evidence-based treatments for eating disorders. My clinical work primarily centers on Family-Based Treatment (FBT), the approach with the strongest research support for adolescents with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. Parents are not to blame for causing these disorders; instead they are regarded as the most powerful resource in their child’s recovery, and most of my career has been spent demonstrating it. When individual treatment is the better fit, I use Enhanced Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT-E), the leading individual therapy for adults with eating disorders.

I completed my doctoral internship in the University of Chicago’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, and stayed on for my postdoctoral fellowship in the University of Chicago’s Eating Disorders Program. I then joined the faculty, treating patients while serving as a study therapist and therapist supervisor on the NIMH-funded trials that established FBT as the standard of care for adolescent anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. I then went on to serve as Founding Developer and Director of Clinical Services and Research for the FBT-based University of Michigan Comprehensive Eating Disorders Program, and later as Founding Developer and Director of the Medical University of South Carolina Eating Disorders Program.

In addition to private practice, I currently serve as Director of Research for Eating Recovery Center/Pathlight Mood & Anxiety Centers, an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, and a Visiting Scholar at Florida State University. I am a Faculty Member of the Training Institute for Child and Adolescent Eating Disorders, providing training and consultation to clinicians pursuing FBT training and certification internationally. I have consulted for organizations across the country, including the ACUTE Center for Eating Disorders and Severe Malnutrition at Denver Health, the Eating Disorder Provider Education Network, Maudsley Parents, and the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders.

My research has largely centered on FBT and expressed emotion, which is the emotional climate of a household, and how it can impact a young person’s recovery. Learning more about expressed emotion can help a family to determine which treatment pressures are making recovery more difficult so that they can get practical help to address them accordingly. It can also help families to determine which positive approaches they are using so that they can further strengthen these approaches. This line of research has been funded by an NIMH diversity supplement and a NEDA Young Investigator Grant, spans more than fifteen papers, and resulted in a book I edited with Dr. Daniel Le Grange, who is largely responsible for the clinical and scientific development of FBT.

I have published more than 115 peer-reviewed scientific articles, thirteen book chapters, and two books, much of that work on family functioning, FBT outcomes, and higher levels of care. I am a Fellow of the Academy for Eating Disorders, where I currently serve as Secretary of the Executive Committee, and I sit on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Eating Disorders and Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment & Prevention. I am licensed in Illinois and hold PSYPACT authorization to see patients in 40+ states.

I do not "fix" a child’s eating disorder while their parents wait outside. Parents are critical to the recovery process and are their child’s best and most loving asset. Recovery from an eating disorder is something families do together, at the table, in the kitchen, on the ordinary evenings when the illness is loudest.

My job is to make sure that my clients and families always know what they are doing, why it works, and that they are never doing it alone.