What happens when the systems designed to help us start shaping, limiting or even defining the problems we are trying to solve?
In this episode of The Systemic Way, we are joined by Mark Phillips, a highly experienced systemic psychotherapist, mental health nurse and strategic leader who has worked across NHS, local authority and youth justice services for more than two decades. Mark is currently Strategic Health Lead for Youth Justice Services and Head of Family Therapy at Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust, and also works as a consultant systemic psychotherapist and supervisor. He qualified as a systemic psychotherapist at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in 2005.
Together, we explore neoliberalism and its impact on systemic practice, mental health and public services. We talk about the growing emphasis on individual responsibility, productivity, measurement and outcomes, and what can be lost when complex relational and social difficulties are reduced to individual problems.
Mark shares reflections from his work in youth justice, CAMHS and local authority services, including the tensions between behavioural interventions and more contextual, relational approaches. We explore power, privilege, oppression, organisational culture, payment-by-results, professional identity and the politics of therapy.
We also consider what it means for systemic practitioners to become agents of resistance and change: finding allies, learning to speak the language of organisations, challenging taken-for-granted assumptions and creating spaces for alternative ways of working.
Ultimately, this is a conversation about how we understand the systems we work within—and what possibilities emerge when we become willing to question them.
Chapters:
- 00:00 – Neoliberalism, Mental Health & Resistance Within The Systems We Live In
- 03:32 – Meet Mark Phillips
- 05:52 – An Accidental Journey into Systemic Psychotherapy
- 08:02 – Privilege, Marginalisation & Identity
- 20:31 – When Therapy Becomes Part of an Oppressive System
- 23:42 – Positivism, Relativism & Understanding People in Context
- 28:18 – What Is Neoliberalism?
- 34:57 – The Paradox of Payment by Results
- 36:35 – From Behavioural to Relational Practice
- 40:48 – Systemic Practice as Activism
- 42:00 – “Be With Us”: Co-Construction & Collaboration
- 43:51 – Learning to Speak the Language of the System
- 48:18 – Finding Allies Within the System
- 50:12 – Individual Responsibility & Systemic Inequality
- 51:54 – Neoliberalism & the Productivity Machine
- 58:19 – Systemic Practice as Resistance
- 1:00:49 – Taking Risks & Speaking Truth to Power
- 1:05:12 – Finding Pockets of Possibility
- 1:09:33 – Moving Beyond “This Is How We Do Things”
- 1:10:53 – Putting Systemic Theory Into Action
