Surviving Alex

A Mother’s Story of Love,

Loss, and Addiction

Patricia Roos was a professor of sociology at Rutgers University when in 2015 she lost her son Alex at 25 years of age to a heroin overdose. Overnight, she shifted her research and advocacy interests, turning grief into activism. She hopes to inspire a moral community of action to address the overdose crisis.

Roos spent much of her sociological career investigating systemic patterns of inequality by sex and race, focusing on how subtle mechanisms of inequity get reproduced. In Surviving Alex, she uses these skills to examine extant explanations and treatments for the ever-growing overdose epidemic and finds them wanting. Weaving together the personal and the sociological, she learns 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, she directs her attention to the larger social context in which those individual-level actions occur.