Book Reviews
LYNCH (2021) A WHOLE PERSON APPROACH TO WELLBEING: BUILDING SENSE OF SAFETY. ROUTLEDGE
Robert A. Neimeyer, PhD, Director, Portland Institute for Loss and Transition and author of Constructivist Psychotherapy
‘In winning prose as lucid as it is rich, Lynch accomplishes that rarest of results: a compellingly coherent epistemology of practice that privileges the wide view over the narrow specialization, appreciation of the whole over the reification of parts, and systemic sophistication over decontextualized detail. With a healthy respect for positivistic contributions to healthcare, she nonetheless reaches further, restoring humanity, relationship and meaning as priorities in the helping professions, anchoring her insights about the essential role of "sense of safety" in hermeneutic philosophy, transdisciplinary research, and compelling case studies. I would recommend this book to any theorist striving to understand the broader backdrop of human distress, and to any practitioner looking for concrete cues for assessing and addressing that distress in ways that promote healing and growth of whole persons in their social contexts.’
Joe Tucci, PhD, CEO Australian Childhood Foundation
‘When systems pull our attention towards fragmentation, Johanna keeps our gaze on the whole person. She explores the way that threat and danger can affect the integrity of every fibre of our being, offering safety as a resource to those looking for ways to understand and respond to pain. This is about illness and healing and so much more. It quietly challenges the traditions of medicine that serve to isolate disease and injury in order to treat it. It gives hope that transdisciplinary efforts can integrate knowledge for the benefit of humanity, carrying with it a commitment to the importance of the body’s lived experience in guiding support and intervention.
William L. Miller, MD, MA, Chair Emeritus of Family Medicine Lehigh Valley Health Network, Professor of Family Medicine University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine
‘The time for restoring the generalist craft of healing-centered care has arrived, and Johanna Lynch’s A Whole Person Approach to Well-Being: Building a Sense of Safety will serve as a foundational text for generalism’s renewal. A good word, sewn well, becomes a fruitful seed. A community of good words, carefully chosen, transform a landscape into an ecology of healing. Johanna Lynch offers us a basket of such words with an engaging style that will motivate you to join in seeding the field of generalism and begin nourishing and growing our collective well-being. A Whole Person Approach to Well-Being is a book about words, generative words, and a book about growth, growth into a "sense of safety," written for generalist healers and teachers who use words to help others and themelves grow sense and safety. We learn to move from "nouns of distress" to "verbs of well-being," and how to simultaneously use words that widen, connect, and integrate.
Intellectually stunning, carefully crafted, grounded in decades of deep clinical experience, filled with heart-opening stories and indigenous wisdom, imaginative, and exceptionally well-written, Johanna Lynch’s A Whole Person Approach to Well-Being also welcomes its readers to a festival celebrating and re-imagining the transdisciplinary generalist craft of healing-centered care. Pursuing a pathway for transforming whole person and whole community care, Johanna Lynch, offers us the metaphorically rich and physiologically powerful, "sense of safety," as a healing goal. Readers will learn the importance of eye juggling awareness of self, other, and context in search of that sense of safety that protects integrity, connection, and coherence. As a family physician and teacher of future generalist healers, and transdisciplinary, mixed methods primary care researcher for over thirty-five years, I am, after reading this book, looking wider and making changes to my craft.
Christopher Dowrick BA MSc MD FRCGP, Professor of Primary Medical Care, University of Liverpool, UK; Chair of Working Party for Mental Health, World Organisation of Family Doctors (WONCA)
‘Johanna Lynch’s wonderful book brings valuable new insights into why generalist care is so important: as a means of generating and maintaining a sense of safety for our many patients who consult with us in distress. Working towards that sense of safety gives generalists a profound moral purpose, a convincing rationale for why we do what we do. Lynch offers us and our patients, together, a coherent understanding of the integration of different elements of the person, not just our bodily experiences, but also our environment, our relationships and our inner sense of meaning. With sensitive case studies drawn from the author’s own life story, and from her experiences as a family doctor with special expertise in trauma care, she encourages us to reflect on key questions and pointers for action: about finding places and people to help us feel safe; about calming our bodies; and about how we can hold on to hope.’
Rachel Collis MBBS (London), Executive coach and author of Applying Acceptance and Commitment Training to Work-Related Coaching, Sessional Academic at the Graduate School of Business, Queensland University of Technology
‘The key message of this book – that we need to establish a sense of safety in the moment with others, before we do anything else – is so important. Johanna’s model is brimming with wisdom and compassion. A lot of rich ideas to reflect on. I do hope the concepts in this book take hold in medicine and spread more broadly to society.’
Pamela Meredith PhD BA(Hons) BSc BOcThy, Professor and Head of Occupational Therapy, School of Health, Medical and Applied Sciences, Honorary Associate Professor, The University of Queensland
‘In this book Johanna displays her deep understanding of, and exceptional capacity to integrate, the complexities of the physical, social and psychological sciences to shine a light on the importance of a "sense of safety" in life and in primary care treatment settings. Her approach provides a map that returns the human heart and soul to the medical consulting room. It behoves us all as practitioners to reflect on the messages in this book.’
Robert Maunder MD FRCPC, Chair in Health and Behaviour at Sinai Health, Deputy Psychiatrist-in-Chief & Head of Psychiatry Research, Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto
‘In the nineteenth century, medicine became a profession, and then a profession of specialists, who over the subsequent 200 years explored and exploited the tremendous benefits of biological advances in understanding our species. As the joke goes, experts in increasingly narrow fields of study know more and more about less and less with the goal of someday knowing absolutely everything about nothing at all. Johanna Lynch provides a remedy for generalists who treat whole persons. Favouring synthesis and complexity over dissection and linear causality, Lynch finds a paradoxically simple path forward. Attending to Sense of Safety in the face of threat and distress allows a generalist to approach a patient’s "whole story at the appropriate depth." A Whole Person Approach to Wellbeing succeeds in providing an integrative alternative to fractured and siloed perspectives on healing.’
Linn Getz, MD, PhD, Professor in Behavioral Sciences in Medicine and Leader of the General Practice Research Unit, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
‘Johanna Lynch’s book is a precious resource for ambitious primary care clinicians who strive not only to cure and fix in the narrow sense, but to understand, and heal. Sense of safety represents a powerful "threshold concept"; once you have grasped its meaning and scope, there is no way back to not knowing. The argument is innovative, meticulous, and in full accord with contemporary evidence and theory, ranging from cellular biology to existential philosophy. Read this book!’
HOWARD GWYNNE, MEDICAL PSYCHOTHERAPIST, AUSTRALIA
I love this book. Most books I read on psychotherapy make me feel inadequate – so much I don’t know and so much to learn! This book helped me understand how much I already know and have to contribute to the care of people in distress. There is much that will be intuitively familiar to any GP in this book and its huge benefit is in providing new lenses for working with what we already know or sense. It feels so welcoming in the context of endless specialised seminars on diagnostic categories and treatments.
The book enlarges and celebrates General Practice; it doesn’t diminish or apologise, and it goes further to provide ‘academic thoroughness’ through research and references. Although, while the extensive references and research details reassure this book has a rigorous evidence base, it did, for me, interrupt the engaging flow of practical ideas that emerged from the PhD research.
Pam Stavropoulos PhD, Head of Research, Blue Knot Foundation, Sydney
‘This accessible but sophisticated text presents a pathway out of the longstanding tension between wide-ranging breadth on the one hand and narrow specialisation on the other. The author proposes a new concept and language – "Sense of Safety" – which diverse practitioners and stakeholders can share. In presenting "Sense of Safety" as "a robust transdisciplinary concept that is grounded in physiology, relationships and experience", Dr Lynch anchors it in a truly "whole person" approach, "from the cellular to the communal". This is not at the expense of the internal complexity of the person, because "Sense of Safety" is sensitive to the intricacy of the constituent parts. Comprehensively researched yet refreshingly down-to-earth, this text is urgently needed. It should feature not only in the curricula of medical and other health professionals but on reading lists of the general public.’