Lynne Jones - Writer, Researcher, Relief Worker and Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist
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Lynne Jones.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Giving children a voice. I think in one way or another this is what I have been doing most of my professional life, whether it is listening to them in the privacy of the clinic, or interviewing and recording their stories to put in the public domain. Through books, the migrant child story telling website or my TED talk. Most of them have been children whom no one has ever talked to before, or sought their opinions.
What motivates you to do what you do?
At a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Newlyn, 2020.
I confess that a lot of the time it is anger at the state of things. I see a bad situation, feel it is unbearable and want to act. Action can take many forms and I have been involved in various non-violent protests beginning with anti-apartheid at university. I was so angry about nuclear weapons in Britain in the eighties, that I resigned my job as a young doctor in Casualty and went to live at the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham, where I met so many inspiring amazing women. The nuclear threat hasn’t gone away and now we face another existential threat: the climate and ecological crises. Just this weekend I have been protesting with Doctors for Extinction Rebellion. We held an inquest on Harbour Beach in St Ives, along from the G7 meeting. Take a look. That’s my Ethiopian husband in the picture protesting about the impact of these crises in the Global South. He is another inspiration in my life.
What do you owe your mother?
Both her and my grandmother were working women all their lives. My grandmother did not go to grammar school when offered a place because she wanted to work to support her family and became a messenger girl in a big office, put herself through night school and started her own business. My mother became a doctor. I owe them the belief that women can do anything they set their minds to.
Which women inspire you and why?
Sophie Scholl of the White Rose. I cannot imagine having her courage but her determination to resist the Nazi regime and her choice of nonviolence to do it is inspiring.
And Emma Goldman for life lived according to her principles and for redefining what it meant to be an anarchist.
What are you reading?
Humankind by Rutger Bregman.
What gender barriers have you had to hurdle?
I think going to a girls only school and then a women’s college was protective, in that the assumptions by all those who taught us, as in my family, was that we could do whatever we set our minds to. The first place I really encountered sexism was at medical school and then as a junior doctor, where the choice was remaining silent and feeling miserable, or calling it out and becoming unpopular for being one of those ‘stroppy women’.
How can the world be made a better place for women?
Education, education, education.
Describe your perfect day?
To be out in the natural world with my husband. We both love walking, birdwatching, kayaking…I am so lucky to call this county my home.
We've noticed there really aren't many (if any) statues of women around Cornwall - who would you like to see remembered?
Dora Russell, I was lucky enough to know her in the last decade of her life. She never gave up working for what she believed in: Peace, women’s education and freedom. She wrote the forward to my first book Keeping the Peace, a Women’s Peace Handbook and her memoir The Tamarisk Tree was inspirational.
Give us a tip?
Believe in yourself, and don’t let anyone tell you that it can’t be done or that it’s not your place to do it.
About Lynne
Dr. Lynne Jones is a child and adolescent psychiatrist, writer, researcher, and relief worker. Jones 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. Her latest book is The Migrant Diaries, published by the Refuge Press in 2021. This draws on reflections, which the FXB Center has been publishing on its website, about her work with migrants in Europe and Central America and includes drawings and stories by migrant children themselves. More of these stories can be found on Migrant Child Storytelling, a website co-created by Jones with her colleague in international development, Luke Pye. They are also the subject of her 2019 TEDx talk.
The Migrant Diaries is available here with a 30% discount, and all proceeds go to Choose Love.
