Dr. Lynne Jones, OBE, FRCPsych, is a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist, writer, relief worker and an honorary associate professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She has been engaged in assessing mental health needs and establishing and running mental health services in disaster, conflict, and post-conflict settings around the world since 1990. Most recently she has been developing interventions to improve maternal and child mental and physical wellbeing in adverse environments, including Ethiopia Venezuela, Guatemala and Bosnia. Until August 2011, she was the senior technical advisor in mental health for International Medical Corps. She is a course director for the program on Mental Health in Complex Emergencies at the International Institute for Humanitarian Affairs, Fordham University, and consults to the World Health Organization, UNICEF and UNHCR. Her work has allowed her to witness first-hand the devastating impacts of the climate and ecological emergencies and the need for actions of all kinds to address it.
This topic is addressed in her most recent book: Sorry For The Inconvenience But This Is An Emergency: The Nonviolent Struggle For Our Planet’s Future (Hurst 2024). Her other books include The Migrant Diaries, (Refuge Press in 2021) about her work with migrants in Europe and Central America and includes drawings and stories by migrant children themselves. These stories can also be found on the Migrant Child Storytelling website, and are the subject of her 2019 TEDx talk. Outside the Asylum: A Memoir of War, Disaster and Humanitarian Psychiatry (Wiedenfeld and Nicolson 2018), explores her experience as a practicing psychiatrist in war and disaster zones. Then They Started Shooting: Children of the Bosnian War and the Adults They Become (Bellevue Literary Press, 2013) is a long-term exploration of the impact of war on children. She has a PhD in social psychology and political science. She is an honorary consultant at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust. In 2001, she was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) for her mental health work in conflict-affected areas of Central Europe.