“Like you failed at life”: Debt, health and neoliberal subjectivity

Elizabeth Sweet

Social Science & Medicine, 2018, vol. 212, issue C, 86-93

Abstract: The need to more explicitly incorporate political economy and neoliberalism into research on social inequalities in health has been acknowledged across disciplines. This paper explores neoliberalism as it relates to consumer financial debt and internalized feelings of personal responsibility and failure for adults in Boston, Massachusetts. Using data from a mixed-methods study (n = 286), findings show that endorsing a neoliberalized view of personal debt as failure is associated with significantly worse health across a range of measures, including blood pressure, adiposity, self-reported physical and emotional symptoms, depression, anxiety, and perceived stress, even when controlling for several socio-demographic confounders. Results are discussed within the context of both neoliberal economic policies that funnel consumers into chronic debt and neoliberal sociocultural ideologies that promote self-judgments of indebtedness as personal failure. Findings highlight the importance of neoliberalism as an important contemporary social determinant of health and suggest new directions for research to explore.

Keywords: Neoliberalism; Debt; Health inequality; Biocultural anthropology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953618303745
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:212:y:2018:i:c:p:86-93

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.07.017

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().