Twenty-first century alienation and health: a research agenda

Alienation has been used as a crucial concept to describe the negative psychosocial impacts that stem from the ways production and consumption are organised in Marxist and non-Marxist traditions. The psychosocial impacts it generates are mediated through stress pathways to increase non-communicable physical and mental illnesses. There has been little empirical research on the impact of alienation on health and ways in which the impact might be reduced. This paper sets out an Alienation, Health and Well-being research agenda. We propose two hypotheses: (1) that processes of production and consumption in 21st century capitalism leads to alienation which underpins a significant degree of mental illness and non-communicable disease; and (2) reductions in prevalence of mental illness and non-communicable disease requires public policies which regulate market behaviour in favour of measures which reduce the alienating impacts of processes of production and consumption.