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In Pat’s words:
My new book, Surviving Alex: A Mother’s Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction (Rutgers University Press, May 2024). It would be useful to talk about my goals. And the two questions that drove my narrative: how to survive something trauma like this, and what might we have done differently? It’s most useful to focus on what “we” more generally could do, beyond individual families.
I was a professor of sociology at Rutgers University when in 2015 my husband Chip and I suffered the tragic loss of our 25-year old son Alex from a heroin overdose. Then, and earlier during his active addiction, we were baffled and confused, not to mention heartbroken, by the insanity and chaos that turned our lives upside down and inside out. My training as a sociologist led me on a quest to better understand what happened to my family. Building on my professional and academic perspectives, I wrote a sociological memoir, Surviving Alex: A Mother’s Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction, published in May 2024 by Rutgers University Press.
I spent much of my sociological career investigating systemic patterns of inequality by sex and race, focusing on how subtle mechanisms of inequity get reproduced. After Alex’s death, I realigned my research and advocacy interests, turning grief into activism. In Surviving Alex, I use the same skills to examine extant explanations and treatments for the ever-growing overdose epidemic and find them wanting. Weaving together the personal and the sociological, I learned about the broader set of factors implicated in mental health and substance use disorders. Instead of focusing on individual-level choice and brain disease arguments, I direct my attention to the larger social context in which those individual-level actions occur. Ultimately, I hope to inspire a moral community of action to realign public health policy to address the overdose crisis.
In Surviving Alex, I describe the two roads families travel in the carousel ride from hell that is addiction. The ideal road—what all parents want for their child—travels a straight line through an idyllic childhood, high school and college graduations, career success, a family of one’s own. A second road—one that parents dread—heads directly into the storms, depression, anxiety, mental health disorders, substance use, and in the worst case, death. These two paths are not at opposite ends of the same continuum, but rather roads that run parallel to one other, and frequently intersect. I describe how Alex walked each of these roads, veering toward happiness, success, and sanity at some points in his life, and toward anxiety, despair, and addiction at others. I make clear that “good families” travel both these roads, arguing that addiction happens to people from “good families.” Indeed, as I underscore, addiction can happen to anyone.
I integrate existing research and writing on addiction with the information I gathered over the years we lived with Alex’s mental health and substance use, and with the trauma associated with his death. I talked with important people in Alex’s life, including his friends, therapist, teachers, police officers, family members, and others who met him along the way. As Alex’s medical heir, I collected intake and medical information from the institutions in which he resided, providing a wealth of information from social workers, doctors, psychiatrists, rehab staff, and jailers to flesh out my personal narrative and interviews.
Ultimately, I imagine a world steeped in compassionate, paradigm-shifting harm reduction methods, as opposed to the punitive, choice-based approaches that currently exist. I champion more holistic approaches that value the humanity of those contending with substance use and mental health disorders, leading to more effective public and private policy strategies and reductions in the corrosive effects of stigma. We need to build stronger bridges from the harm reduction policy world to the lives of families facing addiction, meeting those who use substances where they are. There is substantially more to the explanation of the overdose crisis than bad choices made by those in the throes of addiction. Understanding the larger, systemic picture is key to understanding how to fix the problem, and the kinds of roles that government and private partnerships can play in developing solutions.
3 Top Tips
1) Move beyond conventional explanations to combat addiction, focusing on health-based as opposed to punitive, criminal justice approaches.
2) Implement harm reduction strategies to produce holistic, compassionate approaches to addiction.
3) Promote multiple paths to recovery and reform ineffectual treatment systems by introducing medicines for substance use.
