Workplace: Subjective alienation and individuals' health

• In Event: Mental Health

Abstract

Karam Adibifar
Kadibifa@msudenver.edu
Metropolitan State University of Denver

There are many sociological studies that have consistently demonstrated the importance of workplace alienation and its association with mental health and individuals’ well-being. However, very limited research have focused on in-depth understanding of subjective alienation as it relates to mental disorders. The purpose of this research is to explore and analyze the role of subjective alienation on individuals’ subjective and objective well-being.
Subjective alienation as relates to workplace behaviors is one of the major factors that tremendously affected and continues to affect many aspects of people’s life. Subjective alienation is feeling of being disconnected and alienated subjectively and often occurs in the presence of differentiation in social status. Feelings of being differentiated reinforces a sense of subordination and loneliness which have detrimental outcomes. Subjective alienation lies in the discrepancy, contradictions, and fakeness in individuals’ relationships and it is rooted in hypocrisy.
Subjective alienation produces significant levels of stress, the main contributing factor impacting individuals’ mental, psychological, and physical well-being. Stress has countless spillover effects including anxiety, insomnia, headaches, neuroses, phobia, and abnormal compulsive behavior such as criminal activities, domestic violence, heart disease, hypertension, and ulcers. Stress and depression deprive individuals from their identity, alters their personality, clamp them in the past, clouds over their present life, and block individuals from seeing the future. Subjective alienation is the result of contradiction between subjective emotions and objective sensation.

Author

• Karam Adibifar, Metropolitan State University of Denver