A Journey Through Psychology and Activism – Sally Zlotowitz in Conversation with Mick Cooper

How can psychologist tackle social injustice in mental health services and drive systemic change? Sally Zlotowitz—co-founder of Psychologists for Social Change and Chief Executive of Art Against Knives—shares her journey from cognitive neuropsychology to the world of community psychology. Sally’s personal narrative—witnessing, for instance, the impact on her family pet shop of corporate expansion—shows the deep interconnections between psychology, activism, and social justice that have shaped her career, politics, and philosophy.

This episode explores the layers of psychology's Eurocentric and individualistic roots, scrutinizing depoliticization within the psychological field. Sally discusses the importance of embracing social context, collective action, and participatory action research in community psychology. Her stories reveal how these approaches can challenge the traditional medical model, bringing forth methodologies that empower marginalized communities. Discussing into her co-founding role in Psychologists for Social Change, Sally shares how the community confronts austerity, advocates for systemic shifts, and offers solidarity and action against a backdrop of global crises.

The dialogue goes on to examine the evolving roles of therapists in championing economic and racial justice. Highlighting the impact of mutual aid during hard times and the potential for collaboration between health services and community organizations, Sally discusses how local action can lead to changes. As we navigate the challenging landscape of social, economic, and global issues, this episode highlights the power of community engagement and the relentless pursuit of a more equitable world.

This Podcast is sponsored by Onlinevents 

Transcript

Mick Cooper: 0:00

Sally, it's a real pleasure to have you here. I really wanted to talk to you because you're probably one of the most active people I know in the world at the interface between therapy and psychology and social change and looking at psychology from a social justice perspective. Really wide range of roles, including as director of public health and prevention at mac uk, which works with excluding young people, and then also arts against knives that we'll talk about. You've been past show the british psychological society's community psychology section. Founding member of that housing and mental health network. Co-founder of psychology for social change uh. Co-founder of Psychologies for Social Change. Co-editor of the Powell Grave Handbook of Innovative Community and Clinical Psychologists. That is a lot. Sally, tell us a little bit about where you started from and how you got into clinical and then community psychology.

Sally Zlotowitz: 0:58

Yeah, yeah. So my journey's a bit of a winding one. You know it's never a straight path, is it? Our careers? And when I left uni I went to work.

Sally Zlotowitz: 1:09

I'd been really involved in one of our societies year, but I'd done psychology and philosophy at uni and my heart was always like, oh, I love psychology, I love learning about people, I love to hear about people's stories and their experiences, like on an emotional level, on a social level, and I couldn't quite fit these two areas of my life together. Like I had this really strong urge like to work in activism, to be an activist as well and a campaigner, and this division between psychology and sort of the wider world of justice and inequality and ecological destruction was really apparent for me at that age and I was just like, how do I make a choice between these two careers, both of which I'm loved and passionate about? You know, both hopefully useful in some way. And so right at that point I was at this crossroads. I ended up finishing a year at People and Planet and going to do a PhD at UCL in cognitive neuropsychology, which is completely different. I was quite inspired by Oliver Sacks books and at the time, was quite idealistic about what that would be like. And then, doing a PhD, I realized like the human spirit is very far from experimental psychology, and so is activism. So I, but I carried on doing this PhD, um, I did, you know, carried it on and finished it, and all the time I was also being an activist, um, and I co-founded the youth section of the Green Party with some friends and again it was just like how do I bring these two areas of my life together? And that that's when I got.

Sally Zlotowitz: 3:05

I started clinical psychology. But I quite quickly found community psychology through Chris Barker at UCL, who's been an amazing mentor at the beginning. And, yeah, and we had one lecture in the clinical psychology or it wasn't even a lecture, actually it was an event that Chris Barker put on aside from the main training in clinical psychology about. There was this, this community psychologist called Aizen Prilintenski and he was from New Zealand and he did this lecture for us on the inequalities and mental health. And it blew my mind because I was suddenly like there is this field that brings these two areas together that I'm passionate about, like that brings together social justice and social like fighting for social justice, fighting for racial justice, fighting for economic justice and understanding what that impact those in those injustices, how that impacts people's experience, how it impacts their stories, their lives, their inner world, their outer worlds, and I was like that's it, that's where I've got to go.

Sally Zlotowitz: 4:11

And so I ended up doing, um, my research on a project that had just started, again supervised by Chris Barker, called Music and Change, which was the beginnings of Mac UK, which is the charity that I worked for for 10 years, and it was working, working with young people affected by so-called gangs, and I basically did ethnography and just was with them the whole time and, as it was getting set up, and sat in on various things and just listened to their stories and managed to pass my clinical psychology thesis with it, where people weren't sure if I was going to. But I guess just the short answer is you know, I grew up with a feminist mum and um, very early on I was not allowed on a on a men's football team at primary school, or I wasn't allowed in the football team because it was a boys football team and I was really, really annoyed by that and I think that was an early origin story of, like my interest in justice.

Sally Zlotowitz: 5:12

and why was that so unfair?

Mick Cooper: 5:15

So that was there at the beginning. That was really early. Almost it was that in your family environment as well.

Sally Zlotowitz: 5:21

I think my um, yeah, definitely, we had a lot of, you know, political discussions at home and um, I mean, it wasn't part of their careers. I, we, we, um, we had a pet shop. That was and I grew up working in a pet shop and um, a very like grassroots family shop. That, yeah, I worked in from when I was like five or six years old, um, and I think that from my dad's side, I think my interest in like wildlife and my love for wildlife and ecology started through the pet shop really. But we did have a lot of feminist chats and political kind of conversations at that point, conversations um, at that point, but also the role of community of that shop.

Sally Zlotowitz: 6:08

Like you know, it was quite an important little shop in our town in terms of like everybody could come in. The kids were left there, you know, for ages. We knew everyone who came in. People would just hang out and chat, um and yeah, and then Tesco bought the land and we got booted out. So, yeah, it's another story of sort of David and Goliath where we didn't quite make it. But yeah, these are the sorts of impacts that these huge social political forces have on people's lives, um yeah, and you really.

Mick Cooper: 6:40

You sounds like you experienced that just in the family business. How that affected you.

Sally Zlotowitz: 6:45

Yeah, and just watching the deeply personal, community-orientated shop where you know we went into schools and chatted to kids about pet care and wildlife and from that to this deeply impersonal, monolithic kind of superstore and you know the differences those things make in people's everyday lives how did you so?

Mick Cooper: 7:10

why did you choose psychology as a route, kind of undergraduate?

Sally Zlotowitz: 7:14

and then it's like I don't want to say LA law or whatever it was, but there was definitely an impact of watching maybe a bit of Columbo and Cracker thrown in um not giving away my age probably, but yeah, definitely originally I was just really interested in, like, the psychology of criminality, I think, and um, yeah, and and how it seemed quite unfair the way people were treated for um, so yeah, that's how it started, really um did you feel?

Mick Cooper: 7:52

it sounds like when you were doing psychology you felt that there was quite a gulf between that and your social justice interest, and it sounds like that frustration was there for a long time, right up to doing neuroscience and yeah, massively, like massive golf, and that's a great way of putting it like.

Sally Zlotowitz: 8:09

Yeah, huge. I couldn't understand why, um, like, the only mention of Margaret Thatcher in our psych, in my whole psychology education, was to do with the Thatcher illusion, which was about face processing and nothing to do with neoliberalism and the impact of capitalism. Like I just I was like, but why are we talking about micro processes of the brain? And I went into neuropsychology so I've only got myself to blame, but like, but even within the context of neuropsychology, like, why are we like completely obsessed with these tiny processes when there's these huge giant forces? And I suppose maybe, looking back, I should have done sociology, I don't know, but I was just like why where are they connecting with people's stories?

Sally Zlotowitz: 8:52

And especially when I went into clinical psychology, where it's like, yes, but people might be have difficulties with their home life and early years, but also look at the context that family is living in, look at the. You know I just it, and I wasn't alone. You know and and and also you know people's experiences of racism and, um, poverty and classism. You know, like, obviously I wasn't alone in those criticisms and I found a home in in critical community psychology, because I was like this is where they bring these things together, and I, even within clinical and counselling psychology, I couldn't work out why it's not. It wasn't more present, but that I trained, you know, 10 years ago, whatever 12 years, more than that now. So it may, I think it's different now, but at that time it it was.

Mick Cooper: 9:44

Why do you think I really want to ask you about community psychology in a sec, but just as you're talking? Why do you think that psychology is so depoliticised?

Sally Zlotowitz: 9:57

I think, because of where it's come from, I think it's origins of Eurocentric. It's Eurocentric origins, it's kind of Freudian, individualistic, positivist, you know positivist science methodologies where everything is trying to be controlled, psychology trying to be a science, in the same way that the other sciences are sciences, trying to do experimental work as its main method of understanding. And I suppose over the years I've really unlearned all of that as part of my journey, um, all of that as part of my journey, um. But I really believe that's the origin of it, is that, well, it's our cultural way of being is to be so individualistic. I don't think we can take psychology out of its context, which is very deeply eurocentric so, which is obviously going back to the enlightenment and everything else. So it's got a long, long kind of contextual history, hasn't it, I suppose?

Mick Cooper: 11:10

yeah, and there's something about the fact that so many undergraduate students study it. I think it's one of the most popular subjects. A level students are studying it even gcse maybe and that at all those levels it's studied in a very apolitical kind of depoliticized way seems, seems a real.

Sally Zlotowitz: 11:29

Something's really missing that, in a way that sociology perhaps is much less so yeah, agreed, and uh, yeah, totally, and it's completely depoliticized in those environments and and and in those education systems and also, um, you know, community psychology is hugely neglected within all, all of the levels of psychology, like it's just really not spoken about and that is probably the most politicized version of one of so of kind of our psychology, psychology so tell us about community psychology.

Mick Cooper: 12:02

So how you? For people who aren't so familiar with it? How would you describe it? What does it do? What's its basis?

Sally Zlotowitz: 12:09

Yeah, I mean its basis in the UK. You know, it's got international history. Really I always think of Paulo Freire, the radical educator in Brazil, as my sort of starting point, but that is not necessarily at all the starting point of many of the ideas. But that idea of he wrote the book pedagogy of the oppressed, which that came out. All right actually, um, I can't always say pedagogy, but um, and basically his, his work was just demonstrating the impact of oppression on um people's, what we now call well-being, um, and how people have the solutions, um, if you give them the opportunities to contribute and to educate in much more participatory ways. I love the idea that that's really clear from him, which is this Basically like a banking system where you just bank information that's given to you, whereas the pedagogy, the education, that type of education that he liked to do and he encouraged others to do, which is that the, the, the basis of community psychology, is this idea of sitting in circles and participating, participating in dialogue and talking through the ideas together, and there's obviously loads of different exercises and activities that you can do to make that, to bring that to life. But the idea that anyone can participate um, whatever your educational level and that dialogue, that dialogical process, is the process of coming to ideas and interventions and solutions. And I guess that idea was taken forward in lots of different ways and in the USA was the first time. I think that was badged community psychology, but the ideas again were growing in different places or were already present in non-European or non-Western countries and I suppose this idea is a really different value system to mainstream psychology.

Sally Zlotowitz: 14:33

Where mainstream psychology is, I would say, obsessed with the individual and the individual mind and the intra-psychic processes of the individual, community psychology is much more about social context. It's much more about values around social justice and equity. So it's got a very strong orientation towards social change, collective action, and very much about working and supporting and being alongside marginalized, minoritized groups, wherever those groups are and in whatever context, but really being alongside, bringing resources to those groups and allowing them to co-create solutions at a group level, at a community level, and alongside that, personal change happens. But the focus is much less on blaming the individual or even their direct family for the issues that are affecting them and much more about looking much more systemically and in a meaningfully systemic way.

Sally Zlotowitz: 15:37

I sometimes get a bit frustrated and that I appreciate that there might be family therapists here listening, and I you, you know I really appreciate the work of family therapy, but sometimes when it's described as system, systemic therapy, I'm like, well, it is to some degree, but there's many more systems around a person than just a family and their origin, family and community. Psychology is all about use of that ecological systems theory of Bronf and Brenner, which is people are nested in multiple systems and contexts, including politics, economics. So for me, as someone who is really aware of the impact of capitalism on people's inner world and on their material world, like, if we're not talking about capitalism and poverty with people, then at an individual level, a group level and a community level, then we're ignoring a huge piece of the puzzle of what's impacting people's lives you suddenly say a little bit more about that when you say the impact of capitalism on people's inner worlds.

Sally Zlotowitz: 16:47

Yeah, I mean this is an area that absolutely fascinates me, like it's probably like the area that I'm most interested in. It's essentially looking at the way. I mean I'll go so far as to say neoliberalism, a form of capitalism where the internalization of the key principles of capitalism or neoliberalism have been so internalized that they form the basis of a lot of the negative thinking that most of us have, that most of us have and including like inadequate, feeling inadequate at how productive we're being, feeling inadequate, how well we're doing it compared to other people, and the so-called meritocracy of career, how how our bodies look, how all of that is controlled by the ideas of consumer capitalism and um, that, for me, is like how that seeps into our minds. Um, from a very young age. Uh, to me forms our core beliefs. It forms our um beliefs about ourself, the world and others, people.

Sally Zlotowitz: 18:01

At the heart of it is this idea that everyone's in competition, everything and everyone is in competition, everything and everyone is in competition with each other, that we're living in a world of scarcity and therefore, we all need to be striving to do the best that we can to get what we need, and to get what we need for ourselves and our immediate family. At best we're in other cultures, in other economic systems. That idea of cooperation is at its heart Collaboration, solidarity, partnerships. These are all ideas, in community psychology as well, that we live in an abundant world. We live in a place in a world that is, we can work together really well with, with the more than human world, as I call it, on nature, and we have what we need. We just don't need as much as we think we need.

Mick Cooper: 18:55

So all of these ideas are born out of the economic system that we are completely immersed in at all times I mean that's's so interesting, sally, because I guess, like a lot of therapists, I spend a lot of time working with people who are inner critic and those critical voices, and in most of our models that's associated with family and maybe parental voices. But what you're saying is actually it goes beyond that, to wider spheres, which is to do with the neoliberal context that we're in.

Sally Zlotowitz: 19:25

Absolutely. And if I'd had like me and a few friends were talking about this, like if we'd had more time and capability I would you know we would have worked on this idea of, instead of just negative automatic thoughts, which you get obviously in CBT, like cultural or capitalist automatic thoughts. You know the way in which we are constantly reproducing neoliberalism in our everyday life and in our everyday mind.

Mick Cooper: 20:00

Neoliberal automatic thoughts. Automatic neoliberal thoughts.

Sally Zlotowitz: 20:04

Yeah, exactly, and one thing I was going to say actually is for people who are doing individual work. So community psychology works much more at a group community level, and so sometimes it seems like, oh well, how do I put this into practice if I'm working as a therapist? But actually people like Mark Burton Professor Mark Burton and Professor Carolyn Kagan who are critical community psychologists in the UK they're retired now that should be included in all people's formulation their understanding of their financial situation, understanding of their experiences of discrimination or racism or oppression, and building that into the picture of when you're working with individuals and making sure you're asking those questions and that, at a fundamental level, is a very basic thing you can do to include these ideas in work, and I'm sure many people do now, but they didn't when I was being taught.

Mick Cooper: 21:14

So there's something about understanding the person within their social and economic context. But it's not just understanding that something outside of the person is also understanding the impact that that has inside the person. And are those feelings of inferiority being judged that many of our clients have, that that you would also see as being associated with those kind of wider contextual facts. So it goes right all the way in at 100%.

Sally Zlotowitz: 21:42

Yeah, and I suppose also it's not just the assessment part of like understanding that, understanding someone's critical thoughts in terms of capitalism, but also then what do you do about it? Like, there's a lot of emphasis obviously in individual therapy for the individual to change and they've got, you know, faulty thoughts or whatever it might be. But actually in community psychology the emphasis is on is on well, actually, how are we challenging these ideas in our society? How are we doing that collectively? We're not, we can't do it on our own. I can't bring down capitalism, sadly, but, um, maybe together, collectively, we can do something and we can put in some other ideas, tell a different story about ourselves, tell a different story that that's about society. Um, that enables a different set of personal change ideas as well. But understanding that, yeah, we're not to blame for this deep, deep conditioning, um, doesn't mean we're not responsible for then doing some change work on ourselves, but just seeing it as what it is, which is conditioning from our culture and our economics.

Mick Cooper: 22:56

Sally, there's so many things I want to ask you about this, but just to understand a bit more the history. So you were saying about in the America that the United States then developed kind of more formally that term community psychology in the uk.

Sally Zlotowitz: 23:08

It started people started using it was in 2000s it was a bit earlier than that, probably probably like um, uh, 70s, 80s, okay, um. There's people like jim orford at exeter university, um, uh, I think he was in the eight, they were in the 80s. People like like David Smale in Nottingham, a lot of white men at this point. So I would point out again that this is the UK Eurocentric view and there's also people like lots of other people across, especially in South Africa for example, doing this work for the same sort of time um very critical perspectives on sort of Eurocentric psychology also, you've mentioned community psychology and critical community psychology.

Mick Cooper: 23:58

The same thing, are they different?

Sally Zlotowitz: 24:00

yeah, that is a good question, I mean, I suppose. Um, so one of the risks of just saying community psychology is that it's been confused with just having psychologists based in the community. Ie like, say, psychology doing one-to-one work in a gp office or in a voluntary sector organization, who's that's based in in the community? And that is not the same thing as the full meaning of community psychology and so sometimes calling it critical community psychology and that actually is a book by um caroline kagan and others, um from manchester, um, and it's a good reference point. Um, it makes sure that it's understood that it's not that it is actually quite critical of current mainstream approaches to addressing so-called mental health, critical of the medical model of understanding, critical to some degree of one-to-one work, but not completely, but just addressing the balance really of one-to-one work with population-level work, policy work, the importance of psychologists and psychotherapists' role in policy work, in community work, all these sorts of things, and also critical of the ideas of the evidence base for psychology as well um what sense?

Sally Zlotowitz: 25:38

so a lot of um, as you you will know. But a lot of the evidence that we have or the research that's done within the field of so-called like mental health, um is actually like most of the money. The majority of the research money goes on brain studies, whether that's healthy brain or unhealthy brain studies. It's a significant proportion of the overall research money and, as you will know, there's much less research money for mental health compared to physical health. And when the majority of it is going on brain studies or kind of medical model style trials, so like where there's a disorder named and they're testing out different interventions, so like say, for OCD, and then they test two different types of therapy or medication and therapy or um, the majority of research money goes on that. And so already and very little sorry, I'll just finish that very little goes on, if any'll just finish that. Very little goes on, if any, to be honest, goes on community level research or ideas about collective wellbeing. Again, it's growing now, but I've taken this information from this charity called Mental Health Q I think it's called where they do an analysis of what mental health research money is being spent on. So even within the research there's a huge bias already towards brain and one to one work. So when people ask me about the evidence base for community psychology, I say, well, give us the funding to demonstrate it and we can demonstrate it in a different way. It won't be a trial. It'll be through participation of the people involved, doing things like participatory action, research, um, with a which has is both participatory in terms of the.

Sally Zlotowitz: 27:46

The power is shared, which is a huge part of community psychology approach.

Sally Zlotowitz: 27:51

Power is shared with those people that you're working alongside. They have, they have a role in decision-making and how, the risk, what is being researched and why, and the method for that research, and it's often much more creative. So things like taking photos and having exhibitions, and or I know people who that a group called Take Back the Power, who took some young people who were affected by violence in their communities, took them on a residential and they did this incredible like work on power and how power impacts them, um, and they came up with all these different ideas and then they started a podcast on the back of it, um, and so there's an action point as well. So there's the research itself, finding out and about the ideas in different ways, and then there's an action point to it. So it's not just that people are done to or done on. They are involved, they have a voice, they're a significant part of the process, and then there's action taken together to improve whatever it is they identify as the issue at hand.

Mick Cooper: 29:08

So it's a very different model of research from the kind of traditional subject researcher, subject relationship. What happens? I mean, if somebody's listening to this say they're a young psychologist thinking, I'm really interested in those ideas. Is there like jobs for the kind of community psychology? Can you be a community psychologist? Is it a job you can go into?

Sally Zlotowitz: 29:27

um, it's another great question. I mean, there isn't the same um journey into community psychology. Like there is uh clinical psychology or counseling psychology. There aren't as many courses. You don't get paid to do it like you do with clinical psychology. Um, and yeah, they're quite, they're few and far between the courses. There's um again, it's kind of growing. People's interest has massively grown in the last 10 years, I would say, in community psychology. So there are courses responding, but um, it's a classic example of you know, it doesn't hit as many mainstream targets as other educational programs and universities and is there specific jobs, like as a community psychologist?

Sally Zlotowitz: 30:24

so not really um such, except for the few organizations. So sorry, just to say you can become a community psychologist in a university in a department where there's often roles in teaching and research and practice via a kind of academic route and practice via a kind of academic route. So, yeah, you might be in a department like yours but with a specialism of community psychology. At University of East London they have quite a good specialism in community psychology as part of their whole psychology department. So there's definitely university jobs in that way. I think practice jobs on the ground are harder to come by and tend to be within organizations. If they're called community psychologists, like, for example, my role, they tend to be in organizations where there is some psychologists influence or been set up by psychologists or psychologists are involved. Lots of other jobs that overlap and are similar um community practitioners, community development workers working in local authority in different ways um and uh, yeah, that, so you can be quite creative and bring in the ideas.

Sally Zlotowitz: 31:41

And obviously there's other professions that draw are similar or overlapping theories and practice, like youth work can be quite politicized comparatively to psychology, um, you know. So there are those other routes as well, um, but yeah, no, there's not the same infrastructure that there is for all of the other psychologists. Roles like educational, forensic counseling, like it's. It's deeply frustrating and there's a lot of interest in it and so it's a shame. I suppose the other route now is some people going to like public health work and that's, you know again, either in a local authority or, if you're lucky, within an NHS role role, um, but I suppose my kind of my career journey has been mostly in the third sector, in the charity sector, almost predominantly since qualifying, and you have a lot more freedom to work as you want to work.

Sally Zlotowitz: 32:42

Obviously you don't get the same benefits of working in the nhs or a local authority in terms of like it's very insecure comparatively, um, you know you don't. You know you get paid more equally to everybody else in the third sector. You know that it's, it's it's difficult because some of our most frontline people who do the most challenging work with, for example, young people who are affected by these injustices, by these inequalities, by these adversities. The most are not psychologists, they're youth workers who don't get half of the benefits of what psychologists do. Um, they don't get bystand standardly, they don't get clinical supervision, reflective practice time, um. They, you know, have very little kind of support on the day-to-day work that they do and are very much in the deep end and um. So there's lots of opportunity to support people who are doing that frontline work as well.

Mick Cooper: 33:53

So community psychology kind of moves and segues into a number of community, youth kind of more social based roles, but it kind of comes off these tracks of the traditional psychologist or even counseling, psychotherapist roles which are more kind of individually health, medical model focused and it kind of as a profession is in some ways I guess what you describe is more risky, it's more of the edge, but there's, it does have that political dimension yeah, exactly yeah, what do you think I mean?

Mick Cooper: 34:25

something you talked about before is and I just come back to is from a community psychology perspective. How do you think I mean something you talked about before is and I just come back to is from a community psychology perspective? How do you think about things like individual counseling, individual psychotherapy, individual counseling or clinical psychology practice? Do you feel kind of affiliative towards them? Do you see yourself working aside? Do you feel quite critical towards them?

Sally Zlotowitz: 34:51

yeah, I think. I think it's obviously very context dependent. I mean, um, I'm definitely not like the most critical or most anti-therapy person in the critical community psychology world. There are people who are deeply critical of it, you know, and the resources that it takes up.

Mick Cooper: 35:15

Sorry, Sally. If people want to read those people, who should they be reading, if they wanted to read something really critical of therapy?

Sally Zlotowitz: 35:22

Maybe like David Fryer. Again, these are some of the older people. I don't mean old older, I mean um, but the kind of he was. He's retired now but he was very critical of any individual work um and does amazing work on very structural work. And then in south africa there's um a woman called shana's souffle I'm probably saying her name terribly um and um people like kathy campbell in the uk and flora cornish in the uk who were both at lse um where they are more critical of that work and they are more community-based um provision.

Mick Cooper: 36:09

There's a kind of spectrum from kind of very anti-thera. What would be their basis for being very anti-therapy, anti-individual work?

Sally Zlotowitz: 36:19

I think just the, the depoliticization of it, the emphasis on the medical model, um, and brain chemical imbalances, which we know have been shown to be I mean, that's more the medication side of things, but we know.

Sally Zlotowitz: 36:39

But we know feeds into people's understanding of sort of their own distress, um, and has shown to be, you know, really overplayed by the pharmaceutical industry.

Sally Zlotowitz: 36:52

I think they'd be quite potentially I don't know about these individuals that I've mentioned, but people who are very critical might be quite critical of private practice in terms of who it reaches and then what kind of change it creates. Who it reaches and then what kind of change it creates In terms of like, for example, if you're working with a wealthy client who then just becomes better at doing a job, for example, that is actually deeply harmful to others through the way that it impacts structurally. You know, you're it's that saying of helping people adapt to a sick society rather than changing the sick society itself, and that was a very paraphrased version of it. But, um, I think, and I am definitely a believer in that, you know I may not be completely anti one-to-one work, but I do believe that if anyone's doing one-to-one work, they should be asking the questions about how we can support people to question and challenge the conditions of society that we're being embedded in.

Mick Cooper: 38:10

What does that? So? What does that mean, sally, as a therapist? Because I guess one of the critiques, like even for therapy and social change tasks, is that, oh well, you can't go around telling people what they should vote for or telling clients that they should be activists. So you know, when you say about taking those things into account, what does that mean in practice if you are doing one-to-one work?

Sally Zlotowitz: 38:31

I think it's obviously yeah, you can't tell people what to vote for, who to vote for. I think it's more about having a critical understanding of like we can tell people why you know you could apply the same thing to them. You can. You could apply the same thing to family, like, oh, oh, you can't tell people they didn't have a loving father. Um, you know it.

Sally Zlotowitz: 38:54

Once you take people on a journey of self-reflection of like what are the ideas and the stories that you're telling yourself that are leading you to feel distressed? And I I know I recognize there's a whole range of different experiences people can be going through which are challenging, and so I realize it sounds simplistic, but I suppose it. There's. There's many elements to it that apply to all of people's experiences, because we're all in this context, we're all in this culture, and if we don't ask those questions, then people will. That part of themselves will remain a blind spot.

Sally Zlotowitz: 39:39

So I think we're doing people even further injustice if we're just not questioning some of the bigger picture issues that are affecting them. It would be ridiculous of me if I, as a white middle-class woman working with young people from the communities of London, and didn't ask them anything about their experiences of violence or the police, because I'd be denying a whole part of their life experience, because it's real and because it's there and it's my blind spot in my positionality that would be creating that. So I think if we aren't critical ourselves as individual therapists or psychotherapists, of these stories that we're told and our, about our culture and conditioning and about the way things just are, then how you know, then we won't take that to to the people that we work with and then we may be missing a whole element of their life experience, which is makes us, makes the whole thing pointless and also they will probably not want to continue because they're like I can't bring this to this person because they don't get it and some sorry, that's it, I was just gonna.

Sally Zlotowitz: 40:59

Somehow it links.

Mick Cooper: 41:00

It all will always link back to those experiences in some way so this is kind of circling back to what we were talking about earlier, about kind of using maybe community psychology ways of thinking, even if we're working on a one-to-one level. And it sounds like what you're saying is in the way that as a therapist I would just naturally bring up family issues like tell me about your relationship with your, your parents, because I kind of our models would suggest that that's going to be important. What you're saying is that exploring with people their wider context, the kind of realms that they're in, that you'd see as a kind of legitimate area of inquiry. So would you ask someone, for instance, tell me about your, say, something like class. How do you bring that in? Then? Do you say, tell me about your class, or tell me about your culture? I guess people might I might be anxious, people might be anxious that that's a bit too kind of, but that might be read as pathologizing or kind of othering or putting someone on the spot. How do you do it?

Sally Zlotowitz: 42:01

yeah, I suppose, maybe in my world, of where the work that I do, for example, with Art Against Knives, with young people like you see youth workers, for example, at work, and this is just a natural part of their conversation, because they understand that it's at the heart of so many young people's experiences that they are obviously affected by not having any money and wanting to make money, and so it's our own, it's, it's an example of like and I, because, I agree with you, it's hard to ask people about their financial situation. It feels hard, it feels like almost impolite and and British, but like, yeah, that's. That's the sort of thing where it gets in the way of, for example, a working class person being able to, you know, attend therapy, attend one-to-one therapy, because that aspect of their life is not going to be seen or like, talked about in a kind of natural, authentic way. Talked about in a kind of natural, authentic way, and I think that's on us as therapists to try and like, think about that at an individual, you know, as an individual practitioner, but like, I suppose. So, for me it's. It comes up in all sorts of ways where I can ask, okay, how you know if we're talking about the welfare system, the impact of the welfare system on people like they can't.

Sally Zlotowitz: 43:31

Young people are constantly in these challenging positions with the welfare system, as are many other people, and housing is another one, and they are weighed in to talking about people's experience of poverty and and um and the stress of poverty.

Sally Zlotowitz: 43:51

Um and actually we've been developing some anti-poverty practice work, um where, you know, in an intersectional way, we need to be thinking about class and poverty in all of our individual work and community psychology work and in terms of thinking about how we think about anti-racism work as well and how they connect um, bringing it into all of our practices, thinking about, as a sector, how we collectively um challenging poverty, which is, you know, not only growing in this country but is an absolute disgrace given where we are.

Sally Zlotowitz: 44:34

And you know I won't go into the inequality stats because I can't remember them off the top of my head, but B I think people know that you only have to look around, you only have to walk around the neighborhood, for example, in London, and see the difference in inequality and the housing issues. So I think you know it, it there's, it should be absolutely part of our work and um if, if you need to talk, find out, if we need to find out how to best talk about it with people, then maybe asking people and and doing a little you know bit of co-production around it of like, how can we bring this more into our practice? How do we talk about this? What's the you know?

Mick Cooper: 45:14

if that's that could be a good way of just starting to answer that question on a personal level so if you were a counselor, say working in a school, and you wanted to create a space where the kids coming to see you could talk about, say, housing or poverty, one thing to do might be to do a bit of as you talked about earlier participatory research, maybe talking to people about how that can be brought in.

Sally Zlotowitz: 45:41

Yeah, exactly Getting alongside the young people and saying, like what do you think are the issues facing young people? You know, and then can we go, could you go and speak to your friends and say you know, what are the three things that you think are the biggest? I mean, often people say social media, because actually poverty is so part of people's lives that they don't even think of it as part of the biggest issue they face. That's my experience. It's like they're more likely to say social media, even when you know that they're. They couldn't get to school that day because they didn't have any money for trying, or they couldn't get to our session that day because they didn't have any money for transport, or. But it's so part of their everyday experience and that seems so inevitable. It seems so like this is just how it is, that it's. It's like that idea of you know a fish swimming in water and not knowing what water is like.

Mick Cooper: 46:41

It's just there all the time I guess some counselors or therapists they work in that context might say well, we sound like poverty. There's not really much I can do about it. So if I'm working on a one-to-one level, I can talk to somebody about their parents or their conditions of worth or their self-confidence, and those are things I've got some leverage I can change. If I start talking to somebody about poverty and they're saying about living in really bad housing or they're talking about not having any money, there's not much I can do. So I don't want to bring it up because it's not going to be a good use of time.

Sally Zlotowitz: 47:19

Yeah, yeah, that's something I think like. I suppose it's that idea again of where these ideas come from about what we have power to change and what we don't have power to change. And, yes, on an individual level you can't, you know, aside from just giving people money directly, directly, which is something that we should be advocating for in terms of a universal basic income but, um, I think there are. There are these ideas of like, how do we support people to empower themselves, to challenge, or maybe it's, it's probably the site, the therapists, who need more empowering, rather than the people that we're helping in terms of understanding our power and our role to create change.

Sally Zlotowitz: 48:13

If it's not with that individual, you can, you can work at the policy level and advocate for change at a policy level, but at an individual level, you can talk to the person about what is it that? How is this affecting you? What do you think needs to change? What do you think needs to happen? Are there ways I can support you to create that change? And then there's really practical things around supporting people, like being proactive, around supporting people to get the benefits that they're entitled to, um, or making sure that they've got the benefits they're entitled to and writing letters um as part of our um collective work as psychologists for social change, which I haven't mentioned yet, but um, the group in the southwest did a lot of work around a benefits clinic um where they um like basically trained psychologists how to write the right, how to write letters to support people to get the benefits that they need and how to support people generally in the benefit system and how to how to address the issues in the benefit system collectively.

Mick Cooper: 49:28

So there was like an individual level response, a kind of group response and then a kind of policy response it'd be really good to hear about psychologists for social change and then say but what you're describing is the the therapist or the the practitioner, that they have some kind of advocacy role. I guess a lot of counselors would see themselves as neutral. That you know, I was trained that. You know, somebody asked you to do a benefit form with them. You say you know I wonder why you're asking to do this in this space.

Mick Cooper: 50:00

This is you know that you kind of apologize it, but um, you're saying that that is actually part of our role, or should be part of our role, as as mental health workers yeah, no, that is exactly the word I should have used.

Sally Zlotowitz: 50:14

Thank you, uh, and there are papers on this about the role of psychologists and therapists as advocates and social justice advocates. Um, I absolutely believe that we should be doing that. I, um, I think, if there's something even reminding me of that kind of response of like why are you asking me to do this? Like it brings something up in me that's quite visceral and powerful about, like, if we need, you know, if, if you need to ask that question, what, what is our role? What is our purpose? What we, how are we helping? Like, okay, yeah, that I don't know.

Sally Zlotowitz: 51:05

It's an interesting question because it seems to me so clear that we should be advocates, and there's lots of you know written on this about why, if nothing else, we know that research tells us that people who are living in stable conditions with a minimum income are going to get better sooner than people who are living in difficult circumstances.

Sally Zlotowitz: 51:41

So if you need an evidence base to help answer that, like, to help make the make the case for that becoming an advocate, then it's vast and, uh, you know, 50 of our health and well-being, if not more, is to do with social determinants.

Sally Zlotowitz: 51:56

So if you actually want to help people get better, then I absolutely believe we should be asking, we should be advocating for them. I say that knowing that people as well, with a little warning and I don't because I don't want to be naive I say that knowing that people in NHS systems are being are not being encouraged to do that, put it that way if not actively told not to do that. So I recognize the systemic barriers to people being able to do it and I recognize the systemic barriers to people being able to do it and I recognize that people's time and limited capacity and resourcing also and they like limit that limit their capacity to do it. So I don't think it's just about an internal belief about therapists or the models that we're using. It's also a hugely systemic and contextual issue about how our role as psychologists or therapists have been defined by the system.

Mick Cooper: 52:49

Sally tell us a bit about Psychologists for Social Change. How long has it been around? For what does it do? How can people get involved in it? Is it just for psychologists?

Sally Zlotowitz: 53:04

Yeah, so we started in 2014. Actually, we started with a session myself and another psychologist called Carl Walker, with some folk from the London Community Psychology Network, and we did a session around the impact of austerity. So, um, austerity was really biting in 2014, um, and we could see it in our people, could see it in their services. People could see the impact on their, uh, on the people they were working with, um could see it on their own well-being in terms of, like, cuts to services and staffing resources. So, yeah, um, there was a lot happening in that time, as and it's only got worse, sadly but we we ran a session about what could we do as psychologists and started a little campaign called psychologists against austerity, and we did a bit of strategic thinking and worked with some campaigners and activist friends to like think about what role could we specifically have as psychologists to create change, and I suppose this is the other alternative. If you can't bring, if you or if there are barriers to you bringing these ideas into your practice on a one-to-one level, then I would advocate for people to do collective change, because one of the things we realized straight away was that, as psychologists against austerity, we had a brand, we had a name that we could all be behind. There was no individual leader as such. We were just getting on with running this campaign and one of the things that we did was write a briefing paper called um, the impact of the psychological impact of austerity, and it was all about the ways in which austerity was damaging people, people's health and well-being and um, yeah and both, and the intersectionality of that in terms of who it was most damaging, whose health and well-being it was most damaging, whose health and wellbeing it was most damaging, which was the minoritized groups and women. And we wrote this briefing paper and then sent it out to all of the campaign groups who were campaigning on austerity as extra fodder for their campaigns. And then we tried to support and show solidarity with some of the campaigns, like disabled people against the cuts, um and um. We tried to do some work with black activists, uh, against the cuts and and these sorts of uh groups who were already active and, need you know, needed as much promotion and awareness building as we could. So we we tried to get behind them as well as develop our own kind of website and campaigns and activities as psychologists against austerity, and then we did a lot of work up to the election in 2015. And then we changed our name to Psychologists for Social Change when we realised there were so many things we all wanted to work on as a collective yeah, and started to do. We went on protests together, we had banners.

Sally Zlotowitz: 56:21

One of the things that was really noticeable for me was when I went on the early anti-austerity marches in London. You know, there was a lot of midwives against austerity and nurses like showing up, um, and you know lots of healthcare staff showing up and demonstrating, and there was no presence from therapists or psychologists none. And yet we knew the impact it was having on people's mental health. Um, so for me, it was this huge missing kind of gap, and I just feel like this idea of neutrality has so immersed oh, I keep using that word today, but it's becomes, we're so immersed in the idea of neutrality as psychologists and therapists that it's that's part of the depoliticization, but it's also part of our inaction. And so now I think, um, you know it again, it it's getting better in terms of people taking action on issues that are affecting people, like the cost of living crisis.

Mick Cooper: 57:31

And if people want to get involved in Psychologies for Social Change, what can they do and what does it do? Is it a network?

Sally Zlotowitz: 57:40

Yeah, it's a network. Is it a network? Yeah, it's a network. It's not. There's no paid staff or anything like that.

Sally Zlotowitz: 57:50

We've been really active across the last few years, from 2014, but since the pandemic, it's been harder and harder to maintain action just because people have become so. So people are doing it in their spare time and and we've got all these regional groups and people are really looking for support for in these regional groups, and you can find information online, um, if you google psychologists for social change. Um, there's a website. We also have a twitter account, um, but, yeah, it's.

Sally Zlotowitz: 58:24

It's been for a while. It was actually more like a group of people being in solidarity with each other to keep going through the pandemic, and then there's, but now there's more and more action. There's people doing work on sort of transphobia, um. There's people doing work on um a community level, in their local areas, um, and, yeah, we're always trying to find ways of taking action. But, yeah, a lot of people's focus at the moment is on the guards of war, um, so a lot of people are diverting towards that as well and is it for psychotherapists, counsellors as well as like sorry yes, it is um psychotherapists, counselors, as well as psychologists.

Sally Zlotowitz: 59:04

So like, just sorry, yes, it is, I mean it. We describe it as open to anyone with an interest in um, in these ideas, and it's it's students. It's qualified psychologists, it's researchers, it's people with lived experience, it's um trainers and teachers. Yeah, it's a whole range of people. Um, yes, it's it's. We've taken on various different campaigns over the years and just tried to raise awareness of the bigger picture issues that are affecting people um, where do you think I mean you mentioned in the gaza war at the moment?

Mick Cooper: 59:44

where do you think that? I mean you clearly see, as therapists and psychologists, we have a role to play in social change and activism. Um, what do you? What do you think our priorities should be? Where do you think we need to go for the in the coming years?

Sally Zlotowitz: 1:00:01

yeah, I mean, like we're in this poly crisis right of like multiple, I mean, I'm starting to focus my attention more and more on alternatives to our current economic system. That's my personal kind of way through this, because I believe the root cause of it is a consumer capitalism. So for me, I think economic, where economic and racial justice meet, is really kind of key for me, and I think that addresses then issues of climate justice. Issues of climate justice. And I suppose the way that I'm doing that is trying to look at these alternative systems like community wealth building, a well-being economy, and seeing if there's ways at a local level, but also maybe at a national level, but at a local level, how I can get involved with particular um campaigns or um setting up workers co-ops or housing co-ops or supporting those to to take action um as and more as a citizen and as a psychologist, although obviously there's ways that you can, within community wealth building, for example, where you can demonstrate the benefits of these different economic systems, and I'm sort of trying to build on that personally. But I think there's so many ways people can take these ideas forward, often like working at a local level, a neighborhood level.

Sally Zlotowitz: 1:01:41

So during the pandemic. We did um. A few of us were involved in the kind of bps the british psychological society's response to covid a task force about um, the role of psychology and therapy, and it all um. But we took a kind of community action and resilience approach and we're we're looking out for good examples of local community action and ways in which communities were supporting people. And mutual aid, if you remember, was a huge, huge thing um, and that basically was responsible for supporting so many people on the ground at the time, and so there's a lot of networks that have been set up in response to that, in response to kind of mutual aid and connect, connecting people locally. And you know, for for many psychologists that might be a way of um, of getting involved locally.

Sally Zlotowitz: 1:02:37

Um, you can obviously also get involved in psychologists for social change and, and there's also xr psychologists who are doing work on the climate justice issue, um, and then I suppose, if you're working in the nhs, for example, connecting locally to local community organizations and voluntary and statutory sector and hearing about what they do and inviting them into team meetings um seeing if there's ways that you can work with them at a service level, um, and and seeing if there's resources that you can bring to those organizations because, again, they're often doing that frontline community work, um, but yeah, personally, I you know it, it's it's hard to understand where to put, you know, energy at the moment.

Sally Zlotowitz: 1:03:24

I think I've also been on a massive spiritual journey and I think spirituality is another huge area that's left out of our one-to-one work often, and sort of mainstream dominant psychology and but kind of eco-spirituality for me, um, connecting to the more than human world in a really meaningful way, reconnecting to nature's cycles, all these things are the things that keep me going and, yeah, so again, like supporting people with their spiritual kind of development as well might be personally, I think, is another area that therapists can work on to help people get through crises that we're going through I think what you describe yourself is just such a broadening out the role as a therapist or a psychologist that our focus is so often on that kind of internal interest, psychic world, and then everything you've said.

Mick Cooper: 1:04:17

It's about wider possibilities and linking it in with social issues, economic issues, global issues, the more than human world, that there's real possibilities there and I think what I've experienced listening to you it's just those enormous possibilities that it's so easy to forget about and to get narrow. And of course, there's challenges in that, as we're talking about, you know, is there, you know can you get paid as a community? So I call it is complex, but there's. There's all those possibilities and opportunities. So it's been brilliant listening to you and talking to you.

Sally Zlotowitz: 1:04:50

Thank you so much for your time thank you for letting me chat for so long. I appreciate it. Little rants here and there it's more well.

Mick Cooper: 1:05:01

I think it's so important for us to hear that and, um, you know, look at ways all together are taking these kind of issues forward, so it's really appreciating.

Sally Zlotowitz: 1:05:10

Thanks, sally and thanks for the amazing work that you all do, and I know you know all the people who are doing one-to-one work. It isn't easy at the moment and that people are going through a lot, so you know we've got to recognize and acknowledge that too. So it's much needed for many people. So thank you.