Johanna Lynch

Dr Johanna Lynch is an advocate, consultant, and mentor who challenges the status quo to encourage the creativity of practitioners and inspire them to see the purpose of their work. She gathers people and ideas together to ensure that the strengths and dignity of every person is protected in our community. She is an experienced family doctor who draws on her frontline practice wisdom and doctoral research to create health ecosystems that build Sense of Safety and offer whole person care.

Johanna Lynch is a sought after speaker nationally and internationally on the integration of trauma-informed practice into medical care. Her work on the whole person drives to help clinicians see and understand trauma and neglect in its many presentations. She has developed a systems review of the whole person to aid clinician pattern recognition: the Whole Person Domains Map. She has also described a healing-oriented a strength-based approach to next steps for trauma: the Sense of Safety Dynamics. She believes that everytime you care for trauma you need to keep healing in mind and keep personal and communal strengths at the forefront of care.

After 10 years in urban general practice, Johanna spent the following 15 years working as a psychotherapist with adult survivors of childhood trauma and neglect. She founded a transdisciplinary trauma-informed clinic in Brisbane named Integrate Place which operated from 2009-2013. She has undertaken post-graduate training in attachment, trauma, grief, and general practice - including a Fellowship of the Royal Australian College of GPs (FRACGP), Fellowship of the Australian Society for Psychological Medicine (FASPM), Graduate certificate in Grief and Loss, and training in dissociation through the ISSTD (International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation).

In 2012 Dr Lynch wrote a paper urging GPs to look 'beyond symptoms' to the whole person, influencing training of Australian GPs in mental health, mental health policy, and leading to invitations to contribute internationally.

In 2019 she completed a PhD, in whole person approaches to distress, championing the sophisticated craft of generalist approaches to distress – integrating social science and biomedicine. This PhD, entitled Sense of Safety: a whole person approach to distress in primary care sought to integrate trauma-informed care into primary care. This thesis has received international acclaim from primary care researchers and has been seen as a paradigm change in approaches to people in distress. It integrated lived experience and Indigenous wisdom with transdisciplinary scientific insights from trauma, attachment, social determinants of health, neurobiology, psychophysiology and psychoneuroimmunology.

Dr Johanna Lynch works as a Senior Lecturer at The University of Queensland, teaching medical students about trauma-informed whole person care. She is Immediate past President of the Australian Society for Psychological Medicine (ASPM) that trains, connects and supports clinicians who offer complex whole person care. She is an advisor to BlueKnot foundation, and trains rural GPs with ASPM, RACGP, and RVTS (Rural Vocational Training Scheme). She has facilitated multidisciplinary case consultation groups with GPs, mental health nurses, social workers, psychologists, teachers, and physiotherapists since 2009 with the Mental Health Professionals Network, RACGP, and the Brisbane South Primary Health Network. For more information on her online multidisciplinary mentoring see www.drjohannalynch.com

Dr Johanna Lynch came to Australia as a refugee from Idi Amin’s Uganda. She spent her primary years in Uganda, Australia, and Kenya, and her high school years in Indonesia. She completed her undergraduate medical training in Queensland, and undertook further training in India and London. As an adult she has remained fascinated by the ways that humans connect to themselves, their community, and their environment, to create meaning and belonging through kindness.