Liberation Psychology: Mental Health and the Systems Around Us

Mental Health Isn't Just Personal. It's Also About the System You're In.

Here's a question I get to sit with a lot in my work: why do we so often treat mental health like it's purely an individual problem?

Someone's anxious, so we tell them to meditate more. Someone's burned out, so we tell them to set better boundaries. Someone's struggling at work, so we send them to a workshop on resilience. All of that can genuinely help. But notice what it doesn't ask: what about the system around this person? What about the job that never lets up, the household that's carrying more than its share, the world that treats some people's stress as a personal failing and other people's stress as understandable?

That question — the system question — is at the heart of something called liberation psychology, and it's shaped almost everything about how I think about therapy, leadership, and organizations.

Where this idea comes from

Liberation psychology didn't start in a comfortable place. It came out of Latin America, largely through a psychologist and priest named Ignacio Martín-Baró, who worked in El Salvador during a time of real political violence — he was killed for his work in 1989. He and others, building on the educator Paulo Freire, made a pretty bold claim for their time: psychology that only looks inward, that treats every struggle as something to fix inside a person, actually misses half the story. Sometimes the most honest, most helpful thing you can do isn't help someone adjust to a painful situation — it's help them see the situation clearly, and ask whether it's the situation that needs to change.

That idea traveled a long way from where it started, but the core of it still holds up anywhere people are struggling inside systems that weren't built with their wellbeing in mind.

What this looks like in therapy

In a therapy room, this means I'm not just asking "what's wrong with you." I'm asking what's happening around you. Are you exhausted because you need better coping skills, or because you're working two jobs and sleeping five hours a night? Are you anxious because of a distorted thought pattern, or because your workplace genuinely does treat you unfairly and your nervous system is picking up on something real?

Both things can be true at once — internal patterns and external conditions — and good therapy holds space for both instead of quietly implying that if you were just a little stronger, a little more zen, none of this would touch you.

What this looks like in leadership

Here's where it gets interesting for anyone who leads people, even informally — a team, a family business, a group project, a household.

A lot of leadership advice focuses entirely on the individual leader: their communication style, their confidence, their habits. Useful, but incomplete. Liberation-oriented leadership asks a bigger question: what does this system actually require of the people in it, and who is paying the price to meet those requirements?

If one person on a team is always the one smoothing things over, always the one whose ideas get questioned twice as hard, that's not just a "them" problem to coach away. That's information about the system. A leader who's willing to look at that — instead of only looking at individual performance — tends to build healthier teams, because they're solving the actual problem instead of managing its symptoms.

What this looks like in organizations

Zoom out further and the same logic applies to whole organizations. A workplace can say it values wellbeing while its actual policies — the pace, the hierarchy, who gets heard in meetings, who gets the benefit of the doubt — quietly say something different. Justice-centered mental health work means checking those two things against each other honestly, instead of assuming good intentions are the same as good conditions.

The short version

You are not just a bundle of coping strategies operating independently of everything around you. Your mental health is shaped by your relationships, your workplace, your community, and the larger systems you move through — and all of those things are legitimate places to look when something isn't working.

That's really what this work is about, whether I'm sitting with someone one-on-one or helping an organization look honestly at itself: taking the whole picture seriously. Not just the person in front of me, but the world they're standing in.

I'm Kate Fish, a therapist and consultant who works at the intersection of mental health, leadership, and systems change. If this resonated, I'd love to have you follow along as I share more.