How estranged individuals experience societal disadvantage

: family estrangement in UK Higher Education and mental health support provision

Abstract

This PhD by publication presents a critical review of five peer-reviewed studies exploring the lived experience and systemic challenges faced by individuals who are estranged from their families, with a particular focus on the UK’s Higher Education (HE) policy landscapes and mental health support provision.
Family estrangement, defined as the emotional or physical severing of familial relationships, has historically been marginalised both in public discourse and academic inquiry. While early literature pathologised estrangement, associating it with juvenile delinquency and family dysfunction, recent scholarship, including this work, repositions estrangement as a legitimate response to trauma, abuse, or irreconcilable values. Drawing on Bourdieu’s Social Capital Theory (1986) and the work of the Frankfurt School preceding Bourdieu, the research illustrates how estranged individuals must navigate a society where family unity is a dominant value and fails to accommodate alternative family narratives. It supports further understanding of family capital and its importance. In this sense, the work outlines that society contributes significantly to the psychological struggle of the estranged individual and from a theoretical standpoint that social structures and cultural expectations shape the individual consciousness of estranged individuals and thus privatise suffering.
A central argument across the reviewed studies is that estranged individuals are systematically disadvantaged in UK society by institutions and cultural expectations that presume active familial support. Together, these influence their psychological well being and ability to disclose their circumstances. In HE, the reviewed studies find that estranged students faced financial and material precarity due to rigid means-testing systems and policy blind spots around access to housing. Such students are required to ‘prove’ their family estrangement, which this research shows is a barrier to accessing statutory finance and stable housing. With mental health support, a lack of training for professionals in both front line and private provision, leads to inconsistent strategies to communicate acceptance of family estrangement to the client. Consequences of this include a reinforcement of the stigma around severed familial ties and what Goffman would posit as a “spoiled identity” for individuals who are physically or emotionally severed from family. Furthermore, those accessing services do not have a basic social support mechanism from society to enable them to process the complex grief of estrangement.
Future research on family estrangement could critically consider the deficit model of family estrangement and look at examples where boundaries with family members can form a generative opportunity. Longitudinal methods are suggested as a way of understanding family estrangement across the life course and the long-term impact of a lack of family capital when encountering systems that reify family unity.

Date of Award	Feb 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Brighton
Supervisor	Mary Darking (Supervisor)