Author & Integrator
Johanna’s writing has been practical and approachable in the form of blogs (for Zest Infusion and Bella Rae magazine for girls), and also in her academic papers. Her passion for the inherent wholeness and dignity of humans in relationship with each other and their community has been a theme of her writing and organisations she supports.
Looking for patterns is a day-to-day skill of a general practitioner, a refinement of a skill that all migrants learn to perfect when encountering places, peoples and cultures they have not known before. Watching for patterns is often a skill that the traumatised who have grown up in environments that are chaotic or confusing use to navigate life too. Johanna is grounded in these ways of seeing and also loves examples such as the way that her Celtic ancestors drew patterns, the patterns that are in Indigenous art, and in folk quilting processes and mosaics. Bringing parts together to make a unified whole has become a fascination for her as a clinician working with parts of the person, as a researcher working with disciplinary approaches to knowledge, and now as a writer wording with words and ideas.
In 2009 Dr Johanna Lynch collaborated with her patients and some international poets to create a booklet of poems entitled Mending My Own Boat. This booklet was described by acclaimed poet and cartoonist Michael Leunig: “it’s a moving and poignant collection – very useful and valuable. Enchanting yet strong and real. It matters. Well done”.
At present her PhD has been accepted for publication as a book – so this aspect of her work will be growing. As her international examiner Professor Kurt Stange says:
“Rather than starting with parts and struggling to weave them together into a coherent whole, this work starts as an integrated whole, and uses that wholeness to integrate many smaller parts of knowledge and ways of knowing in a way that helpfully advances understanding, and I believe will stimulate useful action, to advance healing and health.”
Kurt Stange
“I have never seen any medical PhD thesis comparable to Johanna Lynch’s, regarding both innovative potential and methodology… The Thesis reveals unusually high insight and broad knowledge, both academically and clinically. It also reflects a brave and independent, academic mentality…. In view of the defined standards/guidelines for a PhD at the University of Queensland, I find Johanna Lynch’s PhD thesis ambitious, important, original and academically solid.”
Linn Getz
“Illness is an integral experience that can only be artificially reflected into biological, psychological, social and spiritual dimensions.”
“Healers are hosts who patiently and carefully listen to the story of the suffering strangers. Patients are guests who rediscover their selves by telling their story to the one who offers them a place to stay. In the telling of their stories, strangers befriend not only their host, but also their own past.”