My name is Lisa Brownstone (she/they) and I am an Assistant Professor of the Practice in DU's Counseling Psychology Department. I am also the Director of Inclusive Curriculum and Teaching for the on-ground Counseling Psychology Program. I identify most broadly as a scholar-educator-clinician-activist, and all of my work in these areas are mutually informative. I am passionate about clinician education, particularly training emerging psychotherapists to provide social justice-oriented and inclusive services. I teach classes such as Trauma Counseling In Diverse Populations, Multicultural Counseling, Psychopathology, and Diversity Seminar: Weight Stigma.

My scholarship focuses on examining disordered eating and body distress as contextual difficulties, which are fueled by all types of oppression, including, but not limited to, racism, sizeism, sexism, cissexism, ableism, classism, and healthism. I use mostly qualitative methods with some mixed methods approaches in my research to center the voices of those too often not heard regarding their experiences of disordered eating and body distress. My areas of scholarly and clinical specialization include disordered eating, body distress, LGBTQ+ health, trauma, group psychotherapy, and anti-weight stigma. I am a small-bodied, white, able-bodied, queer, and Jewish person doing this work and aim to leverage my power and privilege, while acknowledging the limitations of my positionalities in seeing the vast range of issues connected to my areas of work.

I completed my PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as my predoctoral psychology internship at the Denver VA Medical Center, followed by my postdoctoral fellowship at Eating Disorder Care of Denver where I stayed on as a Licensed Clinical Psychologist. While at EDCare, I served as the Binge Eating Disorder Track Coordinator, and engaged in program development related to social justice through the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. I remain active as a clinician in my small private practice. I lead the Bodies Eating and Emotions (BEE) Lab at the Morgridge College of Education. If you are interested in learning more, check out our Portfolio page here: http://portfolio.du.edu/beelab

Recent Selected Publications:

Brownstone, L. M., Mihas, P., Butler, R. M., Maman, S., Mihas, P., Peterson, C., Bulik, C., & Bardone-Cone, M. (2021). Lived experience of subjective binge eating: An inductive thematic analysis. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 54, 2192–2205.

Brownstone, L. M., Kelly, D. A., Maloul, E., Dinneen, J., Palazzolo, L. A., Raque, T. L., & Greene, A. (2021). “It’s just not comfortable to exist in a body:” Transgender/gender nonbinary individuals’ experiences of body and eating distress during the COVID-19 pandemic. Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity. Advanced online publication.

Greene, A. K. & Brownstone, L. M. (in press). “Just a place to keep track of myself:” Eating disorders, social media, and the quantified self. Feminist Media Studies.

Brownstone, L. M., Kelly, D. A., Ko, S. J., Jasper, M. L., Sumlin, L., Hall, J., Anderson, E., & Goffredi, A. (2021). Dismantling weight stigma: A group intervention in a partial hospitalization and intensive outpatient eating disorder treatment program. Psychotherapy, 58, 282-287.

Brownstone, L. M., DeRieux, J. E., Kelly, D. A., Sumlin, L. J., & Gaudiani, J. L. (2021). Body mass index requirements for gender affirming surgeries are not empirically based. Transgender Health, 6, 121-124.

Greene, A. K., Maloul, E., Kelly, D. A., Norling, H. N. & Brownstone, L. M. (in press). “An immaculate keeper of my social media feed”: Social media usage in body justice communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Social Media + Society. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051221077024