Neo-Liberalism, Mental Health and Resistance Within The Systems We Live In: In conversation with Mark Phillips

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 In03:32 – Meet Mark Phillips05:52 – An Accidental Journey into Systemic Psychotherapy08:02 – Privilege, Marginalisation & Identity20:31 – When Therapy Becomes Part of an Oppressive System23:42 – Positivism, Relativism & Understanding People in Context28:18 – What Is Neoliberalism?34:57 – The Paradox of Payment by Results36:35 – From Behavioural to Relational Practice40:48 – Systemic Practice as Activism42:00 – “Be With Us”: Co-Construction & Collaboration43:51 – Learning to Speak the Language of the System48:18 – Finding Allies Within the System50:12 – Individual Responsibility & Systemic Inequality51:54 – Neoliberalism & the Productivity Machine58:19 – Systemic Practice as Resistance1:00:49 – Taking Risks & Speaking Truth to Power1:05:12 – Finding Pockets of Possibility1:09:33 – Moving Beyond “This Is How We Do Things”1:10:53 – Putting Systemic Theory Into Action