Dr Johanna Lynch

Dr Johanna Lynch MBBS PhD FRACGP FASPM Grad Cert (Grief and Loss) is a GP psychotherapist and senior lecturer with The University of Queensland’s General Practice Clinical Unit. She has spent the last 15 years of her 25-year career as a GP caring for adults who are survivors of childhood trauma and neglect. This practical clinical work of being with those in our community who are often marginalised, misunderstood, and categorised with multiple mental health diagnoses has led her to search for approaches to the whole person that are applicable across disciplines. She has pioneered approaches that actively work against the fragmentation caused by trauma and neglect. She is a clinical advisor to a domestic and family violence program with Brisbane South PHN and to Blue Knot Foundation, is on the ALIVE intersectoral policy committee, and is president of the Australian Society for Psychological Medicine that educates supports and champions GPs and allied health providers who offer complex whole person care. She teaches mental health skills and trauma-informed care to GPs, medical students, and multidisciplinary clinicians. Her 2019 PhD, entitled Sense of Safety: a whole person approach to distress in primary care sought to integrate trauma-informed care into primary care approaches to the whole person. Her clinical and academic work champions the sophisticated craft of generalism – integrating social science and biomedicine. Her work has received international acclaim from primary care researchers as a paradigm change in approaches to people in distress. It integrates lived experience and Indigenous wisdom with transdisciplinary scientific insights from trauma, attachment, social determinants of health, neurobiology, psychophysiology and psychoneuroimmunology. This work has been published in a peer-reviewed academic book: A Whole Person Approach to Wellbeing: Building Sense of Safety (2021): Routledge.