What Euphoria Gets Right About Addiction and Grief, Explained by a Psychologist

Euphoria opens an important conversation about addiction, grief, and what the path to recovery can look like.

In the days before Angus Cloud died, he had just buried his father. It is the same loss at the heart of Rue’s story, and it points to one of the most significant relapse triggers there is: grief.

People with a history of substance use can be particularly vulnerable during periods of loss, even if they have been stable for a long time. When we lose someone central to our lives, the pain can be profound enough to bypass every coping skill a person has built.

Euphoria understood the weight of that grief long before the finale. Rue’s father, who died of cancer when she was young, is a presence that haunts the entire series. In Season 1, after his death, a young Rue walks into his room and picks up his maroon hoodie from the bed, breathing in what’s left of him. She never stops wearing it. In the series finale, when Ali finds her gone, she is still wrapped in that hoodie.

That image is more than just good storytelling. It’s a clinical truth about what grief can do to people. Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood. The more ACEs a person experiences, the more likely they are to struggle with addiction, mental illness, and chronic disease. For many people, addiction isn’t where the story begins, but where unaddressed pain eventually lands.

Understanding why addiction takes root is one thing. Understanding how it behaves over time is another. For those who followed Rue Bennett across three seasons, her arc captures something most mainstream portrayals get wrong: addiction is not a straight line.

In Season 1, Rue is in fresh, desperate crisis. By Season 3 she’s five years older, working as a drug mule, and her relationship with substances has shifted. She isn’t using hard drugs the way she once was. She’s found a kind of uneasy equilibrium that looks, to the outside world, like getting by.

Addiction can quiet down for stretches, but vulnerability rarely disappears entirely. In the finale, Rue doesn’t relapse in the way most people might imagine. She hurts her hand and takes what she believes is a pain pill. She doesn’t know it was deliberately laced with fentanyl by someone who knew exactly how to use her vulnerability against her. That moment, one injury, one pill, one unguarded instant, is all it takes. It illustrates how the delicate circumstances addiction creates between life or death leave very little margin for error.

Rue’s story raises an important question: what does the right kind of support look like? Understanding what recovery-focused care involves can help people make more informed decisions about treatment. This commonly includes:

Re-establishing safety. Many people living with addiction have spent years being judged or dismissed. The therapeutic relationship itself is often part of the healing process.

Treating both the addiction and what’s driving it. Treatment should address not only the substance use, but the underlying pain fueling it. Evidence-based approaches like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Internal Family Systems (IFS), and trauma-informed care are designed to help people safely process the pain they’ve been carrying.

Understanding that recovery can be non-linear. One of the most damaging myths about recovery is that relapse means failure. In reality, addiction is a chronic condition with a non-linear recovery path. A relapse can reveal important information about triggers, unmet needs, and what support may be missing. Reframing relapse from a source of shame to a source of information can be one of the most important shifts a person makes in recovery.

Community and connection. Isolation is one of addiction’s most dangerous companions. Peer support, group therapy, family involvement where healthy and appropriate, and community connection are an integral component of recovery.

Euphoria didn’t offer a happy ending. It offered an honest one. And sometimes the most powerful thing a story can do is refuse to look away. What the show understood, and what clinicians often see, is that addiction is rarely about the substance itself. For many people, something deeper, entangled, and complex is driving it.

Stories like Rue’s are a reminder to seek help for addiction. With support and mental health treatment, a different ending is possible.

If you or someone you love is struggling, LifeStance offers online and in-person therapy and psychiatry with clinicians who specialize in treating addiction alongside the mental health conditions that often accompany it.

References to Euphoria are for educational discussion only and do not imply endorsement.