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When we first launched the Money and Mental Health series in 2023, we underlined the link between our pockets and our perspectives. Then, the focus was the housing crisis and the rising cost of living—issues that remain just as pressing in 2025. Add to that fresh anxieties about artificial intelligence and tariffs reshaping both the job market and our bank accounts.
To better understand the issues, The Catalyst is examining four themes over four weeks, emphasizing the tools needed for individuals to cope with their money worries and mental health challenges. We speak to experts on the two topics—and sometimes, those people are one and the same.
In some jurisdictions, financial therapists are certified in both wealth-building and the emotional aspects of budgeting, or to support linked issues such as gambling. Elsewhere, some financial professionals have jumped into therapeutic practice – and many mental health clinicians are incorporating financial issues into their practices.
In Canada, Jessica Moorhouse touches on the emotional aspects of money in her book Everything but Money: The Hidden Barriers Between You and Financial Freedom (Collins, 2024), which offers hopeful and helpful tips. The author and Certified Financial Counsellor is known as a millennial money expert, which, she says, used to connote “young person,” but not so much now as that cohort edges into their 40s. Their entry into and through adulthood has always been beset by challenges.
“It can feel like we’re having the same conversations,” she says. “It’s hard to pinpoint a time when things were not chaotic – it’s a generation that is getting used to a state of constant change with a baseline of anxiety.”
Jessica Moorhouse, author and Certified Financial Counsellor, focuses on wallets and well-being and what happens when they collide.
In recent years, there has been a global pandemic, rising costs of living, stagnating wages, geopolitical uncertainty, and tariffs, to name a few things. “We’ve been consistently talking about inconsistency since 2020,” Moorhouse notes, saying that millennials, in particular, are primed to wonder when the next big global shift is going to hit them.
For Gen Z, these experiences are baked in, and they have an extensive associated vocabulary, Moorhouse says. Consider the term “Menty B,” used widely on social media. “This is freaky to have shorthand slang for a mental breakdown,” she says. “That’s a concern – that it’s just normal to have anxiety, or to not be able to get up in the morning. There is a sense that you’re supposed to laugh it off, make a TikTok, and go to work.”
It carries a sense of solidarity among a generation struggling with financial disillusionment. They believe the system is broken because wages are not keeping up with the cost of living, and housing prices are too high.
It’s a heavy burden. Research indicates that economic conditions and related factors, including unemployment and poverty, can significantly impact suicide rates. Moorhouse highlights a study from the UK-based Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, which shows that 46 percent of people in debt have a mental health issue, and 86 percent of survey participants said their financial situation worsened their mental health problems and led to increased stress and anxiety. Likewise, 18 percent of individuals with mental health issues fall into debt, with 72 percent reporting that their mental health problems worsened their financial situation, creating a never-ending cycle.
Serena Dawson (a pseudonym), 19, observes some of these issues within her social circle. She lives in a major city in Ontario and is taking a gap year while working multiple jobs. She and many of her friends consider retirement a myth because of the astronomical cost of living and wages that don’t cover shelter expenses in nearly every city in Canada; they feel that policymakers are unaware of how to reform the system to benefit young people.
“Most young adults have at least three jobs, and I know people with up to six jobs,” she says. “One job doesn’t provide enough to meet basic needs, so people supplement with additional part-time jobs, contract work, and operating side hustles such as baking businesses out of their homes.”
Working all the time with competing commitments leaves little time for socializing or sleep, she says. “The toll on mental health is heavy. Conversations about anxiety, depression, and chronic health issues are everyday occurrences.”
Hustle, anxiety, repeat
The usual antidote to economic woes has traditionally been self-improvement. However, for many, traditional paths to advancement — like higher education — no longer feel worthwhile. Degrees don’t always guarantee jobs or stability, raising doubts about whether the investment pays off.
This confluence of conditions is something seemingly distinct to Generation Z. Psychology Today characterized this generation’s grief as one about unattainable developmental milestones, such as starting a family, owning a home, or retiring with financial stability.
“The disappearance of additional cultural anchor points, such as affordable education, a shared sense of truth, and community cohesion, only deepens the distress.”
For millennials, there was a different framing of their challenges with putting bread on the table.
“It was annoying to see the characterization that we’re lazy, avocado-toast-over spenders,” Moorhouse says. “We have three jobs! If we weren’t going to figure it out, we wouldn’t have three jobs – we would just give up.”
In this regard, traditional financial advice falls flat. This generation and those that follow are inheriting a different set of rules than their parents or grandparents did.
“Boomers, especially, did have a lot of privilege and gains on their homes,” Moorhouse notes, “and they took it as a baseline – as if everyone can afford a house or get a job at an executive level without advanced degrees. There was a big shift after that generation. You just can’t get that anymore.”
From debt to despair and back again – rethinking financial advice
The idea for this series grew out of young people’s perspectives—those finishing high school, launching careers, or trying to find footing in a shifting economy. Their common refrain: financial dystopia and distress. Stable jobs, home ownership, and retirement feel out of reach, with early setbacks snowballing into lifelong hurdles. Economists call this “scarring.” We ask: What are the mental health impacts, and what policy shifts are needed?
Whether you view artificial intelligence as an opportunity or an extinction event, its propulsion marks an inflection point in our society, and its impacts on the job market are playing out in real time. How do we build resilience—personally and collectively—while weaving psychological health and safety into economic policy?
As the world changes, what advice and tips do we need now? How can financial literacy be connected to emotional awareness as linked concepts? We ask practitioners and people with lived experience for their strategies.
Watch for the entire series published in October and November 2025 for Financial Literacy Month in The Catalyst, the magazine of the Mental Health Commission of Canada. Follow us on LinkedIn to see new articles and resources.
Further reading: Housing First – What’s Next?
Resource: Mental Health and the High Cost of Living Policy Brief
Author: Fateema Sayani doesn’t overspend on avocado toast. She makes her own at home and researches and writes regularly in The Catalyst.
There were so many people waiting to meet Max, but only his father and I got to see and hold him. For his older brother Henry, our extended family and friends, and especially for his younger brother, Simon—who came later—it could easily feel like Max didn’t exist. But he did exist. Max was born on August 30, 2014.
Eleven years ago, Krista Beneš was a working mom with a healthy two-year-old and a busy life. Her second pregnancy was progressing exactly as expected until Krista noticed a decrease in the baby’s movement.
My OBGYN did a quick scan. We saw the baby moving, and I felt reassured. Later that week, though, something continued to bother me. I remember driving to the Ottawa Civic Hospital to have it checked out. My husband, Kris, offered to come, but he was working, and I’d already started maternity leave. I said I’d call him after we got the all-clear.
When an ultrasound didn’t detect the baby’s heartbeat, I went into shock. I couldn’t fathom how the outcome we’d imagined—this vision of our healthy baby and the life we’d have together—could be taken away so abruptly. Kris rushed to my side. The induction commenced, and I laboured, listening to other babies being born, knowing I would never hear Max’s cries. The delivery process took two days.
We’d spent weeks preparing Max’s room, painting a navy-and-white accent wall, arranging all the cozy touches. Everything was set to welcome him home. Instead, Max was born still at 38 weeks.
Kris and I held him for what felt like only a few fleeting moments. Our hospital room was marked with a butterfly to signify what had happened. A volunteer photographer came, which struck me at the time as a terrible idea—why would somebody want to take photos of my dead baby? But now, I cherish those remembrance portraits. Max was loved. He still is.
Big brothers Simon and Henry pay tribute to Max.
You move so quickly, from expecting to celebrate a brand-new baby to planning their funeral. Kris and I had never even thought about where we were going to be buried. Now, we had to decide for Max. The situation tested our spiritual beliefs in an impossibly immediate way. All I knew for sure was that I couldn’t leave my baby all alone.
We found a place with Max’s great-grandparents, not far from where I grew up. It is a familiar space, close enough to home. With the support of family and friends, we got through it. There were weeks and weeks of meal drop-offs, flower deliveries, house-cleaning services, good thoughts, and warm wishes.
A network of support
My first priorities were healing my body and caring for Henry. When he was in daycare, I cried and slept. When he was home, I rallied myself to play with him, so his mommy wasn’t completely overtaken by the dark cloud of sorrow.
After about six weeks, a grief group opened up through Roger Neilson House (now called Roger Neilson Children’s Hospice). Kris and I signed up together. That’s where we learned it was okay to share Max’s photos, okay to talk about him. It was important to understand that we could include Max as part of our family and bring his memory into our day-to-day.
Carol Openshaw, who co-facilitated the bereaved parents’ group, noticed that families whose children had died in infancy sometimes didn’t return after the first session. She suspected those parents—who never got to know their child—found it hard to relate to parents who’d had years to watch their children grow. Disenfranchised grief is incredibly isolating, so Carol initiated a peer-support program to help match people whose experiences mirrored one another. That’s how I met Julia Winslow. Her son, Carter, was born still at 38 weeks, just like Max.
You can’t imagine the difference it makes to have someone you can text: I just walked past the diaper aisle and now I’m crying, and they get exactly how you feel. Even now, Julia continues to be an important touchstone in my life.
When Julia left the hospital after Carter’s stillbirth, she got a pamphlet on suicide prevention. That’s it. The leaflet validated the emotional severity of losing a child, but it didn’t come close to meeting her needs. Over the past decade, Julia has helped narrow that resource gap by taking on a leadership role with the Butterfly Run, which supports Ottawa families who’ve experienced loss during pregnancy and infertility. They’ve helped thousands of people, and the run has spread to communities like Vancouver, Kelowna, Nanaimo and Whistler.
Thanks to these and other ongoing efforts, a wide range of resources has been developed to support families across Canada. The stigma of losing a child used to mean people hid themselves away. Now, people are finding one another in ways that are healing and affirming.
Krista Beneš recently made a career change as Manager of Prenatal Screening and Complex Perinatal Portfolio at the Better Outcomes Registry & Network (BORN).
Cherished memories
When I became pregnant again, with our son Simon, anxieties naturally arose. Along with physical concerns, there were also nagging worries like, ‘What if everyone forgets about Max?’
Henry helped alleviate that fear when he first took part in his school’s annual Terry Fox Run. Each student was given the chance to dedicate their run to someone, and Henry’s tribute card read, “Terry ran for me, I am running for Max.” I was so proud. Henry’s tribute made me think we must be doing something right, teaching our boys that they can remember their brother.
Other people remember Max, too. Loved ones still call or text me on his birthday. It means a lot. I’m not suggesting that everyone needs to do this, but the shared acknowledgement feels supportive to me.
With each passing year, our love for Max grows more layered, and his mattering in our family never wavers. Earlier this year, I saw a job posting that asked, “Are you passionate about improving the health outcomes for pregnant individuals and their babies?”
I felt this pull. I’d been at the Mental Health Commission of Canada for nine years and loved it, but who better to contribute to an understanding of how we could do this than someone who’s experienced the most devastating outcome of all?
Now, after taking a big professional leap, I’m surrounded by a team of incredibly bright, passionate individuals who are all working towards the vision of ensuring the best possible beginnings for lifelong health. What a great way to honour Max’s legacy.
As told to Jessica Waite, a best-selling author and award-winning essayist who writes frequently about grief – and hope.
Resources:
- At the Pregnancy and Infant Loss Support Centre, the practitioner team consists of bereaved parents whose direct experiences have led them into counselling and coaching work.
- Aditi Lovering, founder of PILSC, says their intention is to meet people where they are: no matter how long it’s been since the loss, no matter how far along the pregnancy was, no matter if the bereaved person isn’t the parent who conceived the child. PILSC offers peer support, professional support, comfort boxes, and online resources.
- Lesley Sabourin says Roger Neilson Children’s Hospice also recognizes that grandparents, siblings, and extended family members can benefit from grief support. They’ve expanded their services to meet those needs and refer many Ontarians to the Pregnancy and Infant Loss Network.
- For bereaved parents still trying to build their families, Roger Neilson Children’s Hospice offers a program called Pregnancy After Loss Support and recommends org for people without direct access to the program.
- The hospice also lists other resources on its website.
- Krista recommends the book We Were Gonna Have a Baby, but We Had an Angel Instead for young children who have lost a sibling.
- Where to Find Mental Health Care in Canada: The Commission compiled a guide to obtaining private and public mental health services.
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Founder Taryn Ellens’ tech startup came together from a confluence of systems-level observations, lived experience, and persistent gaps that weren’t being addressed, especially in First Nations communities in the Yukon.
Ainome—pronounced like “I know me” is a mental wellness organization in Whitehorse that supports overlooked communities with “a sustained effort to reimagine how tech can reflect lived realities in underserved communities,” says Ellens, who is also a PhD neuroscience researcher at the University of Alberta.
In 2022, Ellens was working as a youth clinical counsellor when she realized that artificial intelligence tools could help identify gaps in her field and issues related to accessing care. The more she examined the data, the more she observed that traditional Western approaches to mental health were not working in many Indigenous communities.
Whitehorse along the Yukon River. Photo: AscentXmedia.
Covering the distance
“In these isolated communities, the lack of access to health services is compounded by the emotional toll of their geographic isolation,” Ellens wrote in late 2024 in the Yukon News. “Most of these areas are located far from urban centres, where mental health care is typically concentrated. The burden of travel, both financial and emotional, prevents many people from accessing the care they need.”
Geography is one part of the issue. “Historical trauma continues to have a profound impact on First Nations’ mental health. Colonial practices, such as residential schools and the forced suppression of Indigenous cultures, have directly caused intergenerational trauma. This trauma, combined with systemic discrimination and forced disconnection from traditional lands, has created a mental health crisis that mainstream services have often failed to address adequately.”
Tech support
Yukon dedicated the largest share of its federal bilateral health funding to mental health, according to a 2024 Canadian Mental Health Association report. The investment is designed to complement wellness and substance use strategies to address high rates of self-harm and deaths. Ellens says these investments help to boost what’s happening locally.
After three years of examining mental health access gaps for First Nations people, Ellens began to design a mental health index – a collection of data that includes numerous social determinants of health (the non-medical influences on our health) and their links to accessing mental health supports. For example, housing is considered a social determinant of health. If you have stable housing, you are in a better position to care for your mental health and access services than if you lack shelter.
The index is nestled into a larger vision—one of a dynamic, community-owned tool designed to surface what mainstream systems might miss regarding non-medical indicators, along with indicators of wellness and cultural practices, such as access to Elders and availability of ceremonial activities. It’s less about scoring or grading and more about making invisible patterns visible to support a self-determined strategy.
Ellens and her team develop models that interpret layered, anonymized data sets drawn from online mental wellness tools. By detecting subtle patterns, such as indicators of distress or early shifts in wellness, the models help decision-makers anticipate mental health trends, even in contexts where formal diagnostic data is limited. The goal is to support proactive responses, including culturally grounded approaches such as land-based healing, traditional storytelling, and community gatherings. All data remains fully anonymized and under the governance of First Nations communities.
In widening the lens on what defines wellness, Ellens wants to invite Indigenous knowledge systems into the mental health field. Part of that means confronting the shortcomings of traditional talk therapy and harnessing technology to support positive outcomes and approaches to care – something clients have been asking for.
“Instead of a deficit-based model, focused on what is wrong, technology can be used to look back at what factors were in place in order to move toward a rehabilitation narrative,” she says.
“Even a basic term like ‘trauma recovery’ implies that when you have ‘recovered’ you are no longer affected by the trauma, but that’s not true,” she says, noting that the act of talking it out can be re-traumatizing for some, but it may work for others, depending on the context. “Sometimes it’s more about talking about successes and mapping out how resilience happens to gain insights,” she says. To account for this approach, Ainome’s tools ask questions to develop additional options for existing therapeutic modalities.
Taryn Ellens founded Ainome – pronounced “I know me” to support self-determined strategies for mental health and wellness in Indigenous communities. Photo: Manu Keggenhoff.
New approaches to therapy
A shift in approach is one way of adopting and adapting mental health in Indigenous communities; another is improving access through online resources, which can make a difference between having and not having care, particularly in geographically remote communities. Virtual counselling was very appealing to Colbi Mike; it was the first place she looked when searching for a new therapist.
Mike was looking for a way to bridge cultural teachings from her Indigenous background with standard mental health approaches. The 27-year-old is from Poundmaker Cree Nation in Saskatchewan and is the first generation in her family to grow up outside of the residential school system. Mike sits on the Youth Council of the Mental Health Commission of Canada, offering insights on addressing barriers to maternal mental health and the effects of oppression on Indigenous peoples.
“I grew up with different teachings – go to Elders, do ceremony, be with family,” Mike says. “So, when I first started seeing a therapist when I was very young, it felt like an internal struggle, like I was betraying someone,” she says. She started to move from in-person to online therapy to find an approach that would meet her needs. She says it took a bit of work to ensure the services would be covered under her health plan, and the get-to-know-you sessions felt a bit slow. However, once things ramped up, Mike felt that she hit a stride with her current practitioner.
“We had a lot to say to each other,” she says. “I’m an info-intake person, and my therapist is willing to share her personal experience in connection with mine, as she has children too.”
Online therapy offers other opportunities, Mike notes. “Being in the comfort of my own home, I’m able to smudge,” she says. “Having a space that I’m able to cleanse myself, before and after therapy, has been really important to me.”
As practitioners and organizations seek to improve access to mental health, considerations are being made for data sovereignty, online safety, and culturally appropriate care, while also considering what innovations are possible, such as through the work of Ainome and other startups, that make space for culture and connection.
It’s a chance to imagine better, Ellens says. “Ainome was born from frustration with existing systems that weren’t telling the full story around mental wellness and Indigenous self-determination, and with the hope that we could use technology in ways that heal rather than harm. Our work is about co-creating tools that reflect lived experience and community-led definitions of care.”
Taryn Ellens will present at the Electronic Mental Health Collaborative’s (eMHIC) 10th annual congress in Toronto, November 19-21. This year’s theme is Global Mental Health Equity: Digital Solutions for an Interconnected World. Find the full list of speakers here.
Dayanti Karunaratne runs the family farm in rural Hawaii and takes a keen interest in food sovereignty when not researching and writing on topics of human interest.
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Older adults are more likely to suffer from social isolation and loneliness is increasingly being recognized as being bad for our health. The good news is that mattering and belonging can flip the script. Our series explores these and other related concepts.
Some get frustrated by the feeling of “invisibility” that many older adults experience. Others, though, consider it their super-power.
“The feeling of being invisible comes up in the hit show Matlock, with Kathy Bates, where she says that, as women get older, they ‘become damn near invisible’,” says Dr. Gordon Flett, Honorary President of the Canadian Psychological Association 2024-2025 and former York University Canada Research Chair. “And then she goes on to say that she can use that to her advantage because people don’t see her coming.”
Not everyone is able to find a silver lining in the cloud of invisibility, probably because “feeling seen” is an important part of feeling like you matter to the world around you. And “mattering” is important to our well-being, according to Flett’s research, which has shown that feeling like you matter is associated with resiliency. Conversely, “anti-mattering” is connected to stigma, discrimination, psychological distress, depression, and loneliness. “Feeling invisible to others is at the heart of anti-mattering,” says Flett.
Although some older men complain that they feel invisible on occasion, the phenomenon is so widely felt for women over 50 that it’s been dubbed the “Invisible Woman Syndrome.” What this suggests is that stigma for older adults isn’t only a matter of age. We also experience age stigma in relation to our intersectional identities—class, ethnicity, gender, religious beliefs, and other identity markers.
Kathy Bates stars as the brilliant septuagenarian Madeline Matlock in drama series, MATLOCK, inspired by the classic television series of the same name. Madeline achieved success in her younger years and decides to rejoin the work force at a prestigious law firm, where she uses her unassuming demeanor and wily tactics to win cases and expose corruption from within. Photo: Brooke Palmer/CBS via Getty Images.
Who turned on the cloaking device?
For this reason, Dr. Susan Braedley, Professor at Carleton University’s School of Social Work, says that, after fifteen years of studying long-term care and age-friendly communities in national and international research projects, one of her teams’ key findings is that inclusivity must guide the planning and designing for care homes, retirement communities, and programming for older adults.
“We’ve seen a lot of promising practices,” says Dr. Braedley. “And then we’ve seen some things to avoid, things that caused great distress to older adults.”
For example, she recalls a day program designed for people with mild cognitive impairment in a Canadian community where many residents’ first language was Mandarin. Personal support workers didn’t speak Mandarin, and the activities all assumed that participants were familiar with mainstream Canadian customs and holidays.
“If you think you’re supposed to know the answers but don’t, it can be really confusing, because you start to think your memory is worse than it is,” Dr. Braedley explains. “The program produced a lot of anxiety. It was supposed to reduce social isolation for people living with dementia and, actually, I think it was having the opposite effect. Cut-and-paste programs don’t work.”
It’s not all bad news, though. In the course of her research, Dr. Braedley observed scores of programs that were culturally appropriate, community-based, and well-designed for the actual participants. And, in those spaces, Dr. Braedley witnessed and, herself, felt, a lot of joy. One of her many favourites was a program offered at the 519, a non-profit agency in Toronto that serves 2SLGBTQI+ communities. This program matched younger volunteers from the community with older adults experiencing loneliness.
“The older people had amazing experiences, sometimes just by having someone to help them negotiate the city when they were feeling uncertain about being out on their own,” she says. “But what was so interesting is that many of the younger people were working remotely and were saying, ‘We’re lonely, too. We’re isolated’.”
Eddy Elmer, a Vancouver gerontologist and research consultant specializing in aging and mental health, says that older people from 2SLGBTQI+ communities are far more likely to be socially isolated and lonely.
“Some of it’s just because it’s a smaller population base, so it’s harder to meet people or find a partner,” says Elmer. “LGBT people over the age of 70 also grew up at a time when being gay was highly stigmatized. It was illegal, it was criminalized, and it was pathologized, so they’re more afraid of being rejected and discriminated against.”
Elmer fears that we’re taking steps backwards now, with changes in our online climate, and a general rise in anti-2SLGBTQI+ sentiment. As such, he warns that risks are on the rise, particularly for transgender older adults.
The mysterious case of the vanishing older adult
Older people experiencing income insecurity, homelessness, incarceration, or pre-existing depression all tend to be more vulnerable, as are older men who have recently experienced a life transition, such as retirement. Some attribute this to the fact that, broadly speaking, women have larger social networks. When men stop working, by contrast, many lose their most important social space.
For many, though, it’s also about a shift in self-perception and a loss of identity.
“People are saying to me, ‘I was a high school principal, or a professor, or a lawyer and I had all these different roles and identities’,” says Dr. Raza Mirza, Director, National Partnerships for HelpAge Canada. “And then they retire, and their perception is that ‘Now all I’m seen as is as an older person and we’re all kind of lumped into this one big group. That’s my identity now’.”
One of Mirza’s many research projects aimed at helping older adults is a study with Men’s Sheds Canada of called “Men’s Sheds,” a program designed to help people establish new roles as mentors in society and connect and engage with other men of all ages.
“The idea is to empower older men,” he says. “It’s also about health promotion, though, because they can talk to one another through life transitions, share resources and share information that impacts the mental and physical well-being of older men.”
That could have a serious impact given that, simple preventative measures and screening can make a big difference when it comes to the social, mental, and physical health of older adults. Hearing aids and eyeglasses, for example, are a low-intervention way to reduce social isolation and improve well-being.
“Sensory loss is very important because many older adults have hearing or vision problems,” says Dr. Fereshteh Mehrabi, post-doctoral research fellow in Concordia University’s department of psychology. “Dramatic hearing loss is much more prevalent among men than women and, often, they choose not to even try to communicate of socialize at all because it seems like too much of a bother, which can contribute to frailty over time, as reduced communication and social engagement may lead to physical decline and isolation.”
Seen, heard, and invited to the party
There’s some debate about why older men experience hearing loss, but there’s little doubt as to why many older men don’t want to use a hearing aid, namely, because that’s associated with older people. In other words, people often choose to withdraw from the world rather than deal with age stigma. (Incidentally, the new generation of hearing aids are far more discreet, and the tech allows users to do neat things like tune out ambient noise to focus on the person speaking, which, if you think about it, sounds like a good superpower to have).
Older women aren’t immune to hearing problems, but, by the numbers, Mehrabi says that, for women, screening for and preventing frailty should be the top priority. Women are far more likely to experience frailty than men and her recent study, published in Age and Ageing found that, over a long-term period, frailty leads to social isolation and loneliness, perhaps for the simple reason that it’s harder to go out and join in social and physical activities. It doesn’t help that, even though women’s fitness is a massive growth industry, there are plenty of cultural and systemic barriers keeping older women from building muscle with good diets and resistance exercises.
“The perfect neoliberal older person has enough money to last them the rest of their life and is using their Fitbit to keep them active and healthy,” says Dr. Braedley. “The idea is that we have so much control and we can keep ourselves healthy if we eat right and do all the good things. Which is ridiculous because we all die.”
“Many, many people, and disproportionately women, don’t fall into that model of the perfect, self-reliant, older person,” she adds. “So, I think it’s about that. I think it’s about classism, sexism, racism, and ableism all combined.”
Back to those invisible women, it’s important to note that it can feel like a superpower for some, but it’s damaging to others. “The older person who feels invisible and comes from a marginalized background will not see being invisible as having any sort of benefit,” says Flett. “For folks experiencing co-occurring injustice, inequity and invisibility, that’s a very painful combination.”
That makes it everyone’s responsibility to find a way to make people secure in the knowledge that they matter—no matter what their age.
Author: Christine Sismondo is a Toronto writer who hopes to one day live with friends in a communal living project modelled after The Golden Girls. We still need a cheerful character like Rose Nyland to join the collective and entertain us with her stories. And, it almost doesn’t need saying, but Kathy Bates is always welcome!
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Older adults are more likely to suffer from social isolation. Loneliness is increasingly being recognized as being bad for our health. The good news is that mattering and belonging can flip the script. Our series explores these and other related concepts.
“I think I was 50 the first time a younger person in the office asked me when I was going to retire,” recalls Pamela, a 62-year-old government employee who lives in Edmonton. “He said it was high time people like me got out of the way to make room for people like him.”
Pamela, a pseudonym to protect her identity, has worked for the same department since the mid-1990s. She’s qualified, knows all the ins and outs and, according to her, actually trained her last two bosses for roles she applied for. She never even got an interview. She recently filed a workplace discrimination complaint against her employer, because she believes she’s the victim of ageism.
“Being constantly passed over for promotions is frustrating,” says Pamela. “Worse than that, though, is being made to feel like you’re a burden.”
Dr. Alison Chasteen, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto.
Pamela isn’t alone. A recent Employment and Social Development Canada survey found that almost half of respondents 55 or older felt they had experienced ageism, a form of discrimination that the World Health Organization says is one of the “most socially normalized.” Not only is age stigma prevalent, but it can also damage older adults’ abilities, says Dr. Alison Chasteen, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto.
“If you activate negative stereotypes in older peoples’ minds, that can elevate a cardiovascular stress response that can also affect memory function, so they don’t do as well on, say, a free recall test where you have to recall a list of items,” says Dr. Chasteen, noting that it’s also been shown to impact motor function.
Fixed mindsets
Internalizing negative stereotypes to the point that they feel like they define our characters isn’t unique to older adults experiencing ageism. Self-stigmatization is a common phenomenon that runs across all forms of stigma but, when it comes to ageism, there’s another layer, because older adults may, themselves, have held negative ideas about ageing when they were younger.
Given how pervasive and complicated age stigma is, an essential first step in tackling it is to stop using terms that carry negative connotations, such as “the aged,” “old-old,” “senior citizens” and “the elderly.” These imply a fixed identity and/or evoke images of frailty. By contrast, the term “older adult” reminds us that age is relative and ever-changing.
“Really what we’re talking about here is ageism,” says Katie Ellis, Program Manager at the Mental Health Commission of Canada, who recently led a research project on mental health and older adults in Canada. “Using language with negative associations really does have a negative impact on quality of life, because stigma can stop people from thinking they can get better access to care or participate in certain activities.”
Stigma and social exclusion go hand in hand. Pamela says that, even though she’s resisting the push for her to quietly retire from her life-long career, she’s often left out of after-work gatherings and finds that holiday parties can be awkward because she’s not in the cool kid crowd. She’s lucky to have good friends outside of work, but it’s easy to see why age stigma is closely associated with mood disorders, diminished well-being, and feeling less inclined to seek medical treatment, as well as loneliness and social isolation.
Mental Health Commission of Canada program manager Katie Ellis led a research project on older adults and mental health. Stigma can lead to a negative impact on quality of life.
Mattering and belonging – what’s the difference?
“I think the big thing with discrimination and prejudice and stigma is that you’re no longer seen as a unique person with valued attributes,” says Gordon Flett, Honorary President of the Canadian Psychological Association 2024-2025 and former York University Canada Research Chair. “A key element of ‘mattering’ is just being seen as an individual with valued attributes and, instead, you’re seen according to a prescribed box that you’re put into, and you feel unvalued or devalued.”
“Mattering” shares a lot of space with the idea of “belonging” but takes it a step further. It’s possible to belong to a club but still feel unimportant. Mattering means that people value your contributions and, simply enough, you matter. That sense of purpose and meaning seems to offer protective qualities, since it’s correlated with resilience and better health outcomes. Anti-mattering, on the other hand, is closely associated with discrimination and stigma.
“Anti-mattering is so destructive because it means treating people like they’re insignificant or invisible or unseen, unheard and unvalued,” Flett explains.
It’s hard to get people to see beyond stereotypes if you rarely, if ever, interact with people outside of your generation, though. Few Canadians do, since “age bubbles” define a lot of peoples’ social lives. As ageist as some workplaces may be, it’s not uncommon for people from different generations to work on projects together on the job site. By contrast, many social spaces are often tightly age-segregated in ways we don’t always even notice.
“I went to a wedding with my sister and my mother recently and we expected to spend the evening together,” says Dr. Raza Mirza, Director, National Partnerships for HelpAge Canada. “But my mother was sat at a table with older adults, and I was sat at a table with younger people who I didn’t have anything in common with. I would have far preferred to sit with my mother.”
The assumption that older adults only want to talk to people their own age is particularly striking to Mirza, whose career is focused on fighting age segregation through intergenerational projects. Although many are in their infancy, there are a lot of pretty cool projects aimed at getting people out of their age bubbles.
In Alberta, the Canadian Alliance for Intergenerational Living launched a pilot project last year that placed students looking for affordable housing into retirement communities in exchange for leading classes in, say, art, scholarship, or fitness.
St. Lawrence, a school in Champlain, Quebec, arranges intergenerational living situations by offering students two meals a day and free lodging in a residence for older adults in exchange for 10 hours of volunteer work in the home per week.
Vancouver’s Volunteer Grandparents has a “Family Match” program that sees older adults sign up to help mentor kids whose biological grandparents can’t play active roles in their lives. Ontario resident Heather Walker wanted to take part in the program but was too far away, so they made her a pen pal to a 15-year-old.
“She seemed like a younger me,” says Walker, who will celebrate her 70th birthday this summer. “Her passions were writing, and social justice and I had so many questions, my letter back was five pages long.”
Now she has a new role as a pen pal with an entire class in an elementary school. She helps them with things like sentence structure and sends them Valentine’s Day cards and other special treats.
Burst your bubble
One of the better-known age bubble-bursting projects is Raza Mirza’s “Intergenerational Classroom,” an initiative that sees a third-year University of Toronto Ageing and Health class pop up in a common room at Christie Gardens, a Toronto retirement community and long-term care home. Students and residents take the class together for the entire semester.
“It’s been highly, highly successful, because we facilitated a platform where people can feel valued,” says Mirza. “We keep hearing that people felt they had a role, felt that their contributions were meaningful, and felt a sense of belonging. But there was also reciprocity, so it wasn’t this older person who was just the recipient of information or sharing information. There was this back-and-forth exchange.”
Nobody gets stuck in the corner at the kids’ table, either. Everyone has a chance to break out of their age bubble and get to be seen as a unique person. It’s a fabulous model showing a path forward for us to fight against stigma, negative stereotypes, and anti-mattering. And, in fact, it might even help people re-define what “being old” means.
“We’ll start the class by asking the students, ‘At what age do you think a person is old?’,” says Mirza. “People say things like 40 or 50 or 60. Then, after being in the class and listening to older adults for 12 weeks we ask them the question again. They say things like, ‘I’m not sure’ or ‘I think old is a perception or a feeling.’ They focus on the similarities they have and the things that they have in common,” he adds. “They don’t focus on the age difference anymore.”
Resource: A free course on dismantling structural stigma in health care aims for meaningful change for people experiencing mental health and substance use issues.
Author: Christine Sismondo is a Toronto writer who hopes to one day live with friends in a communal living project modelled after The Golden Girls. In a perfect world, there’d be someone like Sophia in residence, because intergen living is the best.
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Older adults are more likely to suffer from social isolation and loneliness is increasingly being recognized as being bad for our health. The good news is that mattering and belonging can flip the script. Our series explores these and other related concepts.
When Pat Flude was experiencing painful side effects during her breast cancer treatment, a doctor from the pain clinic at Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH) gave her a “social prescription” for a mindfulness-based cognitive behavioural therapy class.
“I went every week for about three months,” says Flude, a 78-year-old retired teacher and cancer survivor. “The psychiatrist who led the program, Dr. Mary Elliott, was marvelous. It was so excellent; I even did a follow-up class in loving kindness.”
Since everyone in the class was also being treated for cancer, there was a real sense of community. Flude says she looked forward to the reunions that took place at quarterly graduate sessions. “For me, at that time,” she recalls, “it was really life’s blood.”
Although not every hospital is as proactive as PMH at offering prescriptions for things other than drugs, the “social prescribing” movement is growing by leaps and bounds. The guiding principle is to address the social determinants of health – non-medical factors that influence health outcomes – that are often neglected in medical settings. To fill that gap, primary health care providers refer a patient to a senior resource coordinator who steps in to “prescribe” wellness opportunities (specifically chosen classes or outings based on interest) often for older adults who have higher rates of being at-risk for loneliness and/or social isolation.
From isolation to inclusion
“The big one is social connection,” says Connie Newman, executive director of the Manitoba Association of Senior Communities. “We’ve got some older adults who haven’t been out of their apartments for too long. With a social prescription, we can connect them to one of Manitoba’s many older adult groups.
“Some might be at the local legion; in other communities, it could be the local senor centre,” Newman explains. “Wherever it is, the clients sometimes need a little support to join.”
Connie Newman, executive director of the Manitoba Association of Senior Communities: Social prescribing can open the door to connecting older adults to others in their communities.
Although research associating social isolation and loneliness with negative health outcomes began, in earnest, a little more than 40 years ago, programs to prevent or reverse these conditions and foster a feeling of belonging are relatively new. Spurred, in part, by the pandemic, which raised awareness of negative mental health effects associated with isolation, “social health” (well-being as an outgrowth of social connection), has become a hot topic lately. Japan and the United Kingdom both have ministries devoted to addressing loneliness, which some consider an epidemic, especially among older adults.
Here in Canada, the Canadian Coalition for Seniors’ Mental Health has recently launched the world’s first clinical guidelines for addressing social isolation and loneliness. Since older adults experiencing isolation often see health and social service professionals, clinicians are key people for identifying at-risk patients, so it’s very important to get them on board.
“Although there’s been a huge amount of research in the area focused on associated health risks there has been relatively little written from the perspective of how to actually help people,” says Dr. David Conn, a geriatric psychiatrist who works at Baycrest Health Sciences and the University of Toronto.
The guidelines, which are making their way into healthcare and community settings, are designed to help clinicians screen for loneliness and isolation, assess the problem and its causes and make helpful recommendations. In some cases, a social prescription might transform the quality of life of a person experiencing isolation but, for those with chronic loneliness, recovering from those feelings is often much more complicated. Neuroscientists have even suggested that loneliness can re-shape the brain in ways that make social contact less rewarding, thereby making it harder—but not impossible—to “cure” loneliness. A meta-analysis of research found that a range of therapies including animal therapy, exercise, and cognitive behavioural therapy were associated with reduced feelings of loneliness in older adults.
The power of place in fostering connection
That’s a nugget of good news but, as we should all know at this point, prevention is, by far, the best intervention. Some researchers advocate for social prescriptions for people of all generations, as well as working to remove health equity barriers, so that we have a population that’s in good health as it moves into middle age. As Dr. Conn points out, problems with depression, hearing, vision, mobility, and chronic pain can impact our capacity for socializing and staying active.
Providing an environment for people to stay fit and connected to the community goes far beyond healthcare and even public health, since it involves reimagining a range of public spaces, some of which we take for granted. Over the past 20 or more years, we’ve heard a lot about the “third place”—spaces like barber shops, cafés, and shopping malls that are neither work nor home but can foster community and a sense of belonging. The next frontier may well be “fourth place”—streets, squares, bus stops—which, if well-designed, can help promote social health and cohesion. That can only work if they’re truly accessible, however.
“The design is often good in a privileged neighbourhood,” says Julie Karmann, PhD candidate at the University of Montreal’s School of Public Health. “But if you go into a more deprived neighbourhood, you can see that the street is no longer that accessible and not that pleasant for walking.”
Karmann’s work is based in the idea that the simple act of walking can help social health, of which connectedness is an important component. Even relatively well-designed fourth places, though, often miss the mark when it comes to being truly age-friendly.
“Basic improvements like more accessible and affordable transit, safer intersections, and well-maintained sidewalks are essential,” says Eddy Elmer, a Vancouver gerontologist and research consultant specializing in aging and mental health. “People don’t want to go outside if the streets are dark or feel unsafe, regardless of age, but this is especially true for older adults who worry about slipping, falling, or other hazards.”
Maintenance, regular snow and ice clearing, as well as accommodations for persons with disabilities should seem like a bare minimum, but austerity measures in various municipalities have often led to worsening conditions. While we wait for political change, social health programs such as prescriptions can help, especially the ones that move beyond the individual and involve the community.
More walks, more smiles
“One of my favourite programs is from the Netherlands, which has a whole strategy and campaign against loneliness,” says Conn. “One of the programs is an app that connects older people who don’t have a pet with a younger person who has a dog but doesn’t have enough time to walk the dog because they’re out working all day long. It has many benefits for all involved including the dogs!”
Burnaby B.C.’s “Say Hello” campaign is arguably even more effortless. Initiated in 2020 by local physicians worried about pandemic-induced social isolation and loneliness, the project encouraged folks to be a little friendlier to the people they passed on the street.
“It’s super simple, but yet requires a whole paradigm shift, because it has nothing to do with a physician or a clinic,” says Karmann. “Just implementing the norms of greeting in the neighbourhood or smiling to the person you meet in the street can make a huge difference with your sense of belonging.”
Karmann says it’s a tiny gesture that can have a big impact on the population, not just the individual.
“It’s just knowing the people around you,” she adds. “It can be as easy as asking, ‘How are you doing?’.
Author: Christine Sismondo is a Toronto writer who hopes to one day live with friends in a communal living project modelled after The Golden Girls. She’s not sure she’s met her Blanche yet, but hopes to soon, since someone’s got to keep things spicy. And pay the bills.
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Older adults are more likely to suffer from social isolation. Loneliness is increasingly being recognized as being bad for our health. The good news is that mattering and belonging can flip the script. Our series explores these and other related concepts.
In the summer of 2023, Vancouver Island resident Linda Fedun was feeling pretty lonely, even though social distancing measures had been lifted the year before.
“The pandemic started it, but it was when my back pain became serious that things got really bad for me,” says the 63-year-old retired daycare worker. “I couldn’t really go out. I’d be out for half an hour and then I’d have to go home in tears.
“Social isolation is hard,” she adds. “Especially since it’s just me and my two cats.”
Many older adults in Canada can relate. It’s hard to pin down exact numbers, but Statistics Canada has estimated about 30 percent of older adults are at risk of experiencing social isolation and, in 2019 and 2020, almost one in five reported feeling loneliness.
Social isolation is defined as having both a low quantity and quality of contact with others. It’s marked by an absence of mutually rewarding relationships and can lead to poor health, loneliness, emotional distress, and other negative health outcomes.
For some, that feeling is chronic. For Fedun, things improved after the doctors figured out a treatment plan for her osteoarthritis last October and she could finally reconnect with her community and get back to things like taking regular walks. One of these took her by an encampment she hadn’t even realized existed, even though it was only a few blocks from her home. There, she recognized an old acquaintance who told her she and her partner had been unhoused for months.
“I went right home and started looking for what I could spare,” says Fedun. “And then I realized it’s more than that. They needed much, much more than that.”
Fedun started asking for help from neighbours through her Nextdoor app, a social networking site that helps people connect with local folks for potlucks, buy-and-sell, and other exchanges. Members of her community responded enthusiastically with food, warm clothing, and propane for a Coleman stove. She organized pick-ups and drop-offs and connected with an advocate for the unhoused who gave her a “crash course” on housing insecurity. The pair launched a Go Fund Me campaign to help their unhoused friends get an apartment.
Social isolation is a thing of the past for Fedun and, perhaps unsurprisingly, so is loneliness. “I have a sense of purpose now,” she says.
For many, though, the answer isn’t as simple as getting back out, largely because social isolation and loneliness are two different things.
Social isolation and loneliness—what’s the difference?
“Social isolation is objective, such as the number of people in your life and how often you interact with them,” says Eddy Elmer, a Vancouver gerontologist and research consultant specializing in aging and mental health. “Loneliness, on the other hand, is more subjective. It’s the feeling that there’s a mismatch between the relationships you want and those you actually have, whether in terms of quantity or, especially, quality.
“One person can be fairly isolated but not feel lonely, whereas another can have a large social network, but feel quite lonely,” Elmer continues. “It all depends on their unique social needs and expectations.”
Since they’re two distinct problems, they require completely different approaches. And, generally speaking, it’s easier to reverse problems associated with social isolation than it is to help people overcome chronic feelings of loneliness.
“It’s probably normal to have some degree of loneliness from time to time,” says Dr. David Conn, a geriatric psychiatrist who works at Baycrest Health Sciences and the University of Toronto. “But for people who feel intense, chronic loneliness, the origins of that are often rooted in early life relationships and how they feel about people in general.”
Despite not being interchangeable, both social isolation and loneliness are associated with a range of negative health outcomes. In older adults, social isolation is correlated with frailty, cognitive decline, and depression, as well as increased chances of a premature death.
“The key word here is ‘correlated’ because establishing causation is not straightforward,” says Elmer. “But studies find that both loneliness and social isolation are associated with increased inflammation, weakened immune function, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and poorer sleep quality.”
That last symptom may be an important piece of the puzzle. According to the evolutionary theory of loneliness, poor sleep is part of a “hyper-vigilant” state triggered by social disconnection. In a nutshell, for early humans who lived in smaller hunter-gatherer tribes and had to work together closely for survival, being alone was dangerous. Loneliness is an unpleasant emotional response that might be an adaptive mechanism, since the pain of being alone can serve as a biological signal to restore social relationships and get back to safety.
Vancouver gerontologist Eddy Elmer: You can be isolated and not lonely; you can also have a wide social circle and still feel lonely. It all depends on one’s needs and expectations.
Mattering is good for the grey matter
Even though way fewer sabre-toothed predators are prowling around these days, being a member of a clan is still the safer and healthier choice for most people. A recent study from Carleton University found that higher belongingness is connected to better health outcomes for people of all ages—but particularly for older adults.
“What we found was that older individuals who felt they belonged to their neighbourhood were about six or seven percent healthier than people who didn’t,” says Mehdi Ammi, Associate Professor at Carleton’s School of Public Policy and Administration. “Belonging reduced most chronic conditions and was preventative in arthritis and anything connected to chronic stress.”
Social psychology proposes that high levels of belonging can help chronic stress, so it may offer a protective benefit to folks who feel like they have a place at the table. Though some positive psychologists say that while belonging is a good start, an even stronger protective benefit can be seen in people who feel like they matter.
“Belonging is fitting in and having a place,” explains Gordon Flett, Honorary President of the Canadian Psychological Association 2024-2025 and former York University Canada Research Chair. “Mattering is feeling a sense of significance and value within that place. For example, a person could be part of a community, but still feel they’re not being taken seriously.”
The correlation between loneliness and the feeling of not mattering is very robust, he says. “The research about loneliness and the elderly show that there are just too many people who don’t have any meaningful engagement of a prolonged nature with the people who matter to them,” Flett continues. “And they’re left to feel lonely. And when people feel alone and insignificant at the same time, we call that ‘double jeopardy’.”
Conversely, mattering is thought to provide a buffer of sorts that protects individuals from significant stress, whether it’s caused by loneliness, caregiving, loss of independence, and even financial issues.
“The bottom line is that knowing people value and care about you is very comforting,” says Flett. “And I think it also means that you’ll be more likely to ask people for help when you need it.”
It can be difficult for older adults to feel valued and have a sense of meaning, especially in North America, where the culture valorizes youth, fails to provide age-inclusive spaces or age-friendly cities, and views health as an individual responsibility as opposed to a collective one. All these things are factors in widespread loneliness amongst Canada’s older adult population.
While we wait for societal changes, many older adults who have the ability are finding ways of aging in community and generating mattering experiences for themselves. For some, that might be grandparenting. For others, it might be volunteering to help other older adults.
“My wife’s uncle Derek, who almost made it to 100 and lived by himself his whole life in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, was well-known for his volunteer work,” Flett offers. “He delivered Meals on Wheels to people younger than him into his 90s because he was in great shape.
“I once asked him if he ever felt lonely and he cut me off. He said, ‘Not for a second. Because I know there’s people out there who care. And I can get to them, and they can get to me’.”
Further reading: Home Alone: Aging without support is becoming more prevalent for older people in Canada. How can we stem the tide?
Author: Christine Sismondo is a Toronto writer who hopes to one day live with friends in a communal living project modelled after The Golden Girls. Since it was her idea, she gets to be Dorothy.
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Al Wiebe on the Winnipeg Foundation’s BeCause & Effect Podcast in May 2024.
Meet Al Wiebe: Born and raised in Winnipeg, Wiebe lost his job in advertising sales in 2009 and spent two and a half years without a home. He’s living in an apartment now and for more than a dozen years has been a tireless advocate for the importance of housing coupled with support. This is his story.
My dad was a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher. Very strict. My mom suffered from mental illness. My life as a child was not pleasant at all. I was a black sheep – I never felt like I belonged. I had to do a lot of things for myself. Maybe that independence helped me later.
My dad had a housing exterior company, doing siding and eavestroughs. I took it over when he went full-time into the ministry. I was 18. I went to the bank, bought a house and a truck, the whole works. Then I had my first kid a month later, then another one 11 months later. Talk about pressure.
King’s Coronation Medal
I wasn’t a good father or husband. I was focused on the business, and I was never there, so I didn’t have a great relationship with my kids.
I also struggled with depression for years. I was on and off anti-depressants. But I wasn’t on any medication for the five years before I lost my advertising job. I was too busy making lots of money. But when the company’s owner replaced me with his friend, I couldn’t handle the trauma. And I didn’t ask for help. I was a single guy, in my mid-50s, living a block away from work. My job was my life. I had no balance, no friends, and wasn’t really in contact with my family. I kind of lived in my own head.
Living in the car
I left the city for a while but ended up back in Winnipeg. I wanted to wallow in my misery. I had sold my Mercedes but still had a nice apartment. I just kind of ruminated and started thinking about suicide. I’m diabetic and stopped taking my drugs for that, which wasn’t good either.
Al Wiebe, at right, with Point Douglas Ward, Winnipeg, city councillor Vivian Santos in March 2025. Wiebe – a peer and community engagement trainer and housing director – was presented with the King’s Coronation Medal for his advocacy on ending homelessness and advancing lived experience leadership.
One day, I just walked away from the apartment with my bag. I’d eaten at a Vietnamese restaurant a few times and behind it there was an auto dealership that also had a scrapyard with cars they used for parts. I plunked myself down in the backseat of a ’64 Mercedes — I used to drive one so figured why not live in one for as long as I’m here. I thought I’d last for a night or two. But I spent 14 and a half months living in that car.
I’d be gone by seven in the morning and stay away until seven at night, because that’s when they closed. I didn’t use food banks or shelters or soup kitchens, none of that. I collected empty beer cans and change from people at drive-throughs. That’s how I existed. But I lost 32 pounds and became very ill. I developed pneumonia and neuropathy from my diabetes. I could hardly walk some days. I began to lose hope. I didn’t think I’d get out of there.
I went to the hospital three times and three times they turned me away because I was homeless. I was looking for psychiatric care and they treated me with disdain. They told me I had to “work on things.” Work on things? The only thing you can work on when you’re homeless is survival.
Signs of hope
A few days later, I went to another hospital, to the crisis stabilization unit, and then spent 24 hours laying low in my car. A couple days after that I went to St. Boniface Hospital. I was a real mess. When I finally saw a doctor, she changed the course of my life.
She said, “You’ve been everywhere and people either could not help you or would not help you, but today I’m going to help you. It’s like you’ve fallen off the edge of the world and don’t know where you are or who you are, and you don’t know how to help yourself. Starting today, you’re going to get better and get stronger. You’re going to start becoming the person you want to be.”
She gave me hope. She told me that I was carrying a lot of trauma and I had to start believing in myself. That someday, I would be able to help other people who were in this position.
After a month in the hospital, I spent 14 months in a shelter. I hated it. There were two killings while I was there. I got attacked and my ribs were broken. At times, I wanted to go back to the streets.
I finally found a home when I got an apartment across the street from the Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre after I got out from the shelter. It’s an Indigenous organization that does amazing service-provision work. It was a big green house, and I saw people milling around. So, I went in and asked if they needed any volunteers, because I needed purpose. I needed help myself, but I also needed something to do. They must have seen something in me. They allowed me to volunteer and, over a couple years, to take courses: suicide prevention, food handling, First Aid and CPR, non-violent crisis intervention. Class after class, workshop after workshop.
The things that make you a complete person
The greatest casualty of homelessness is a loss of self-respect and self-worth, dignity, and confidence. Everything that makes you a complete person and allows you to move forward. I lost all that in a big hurry, but every time I took another course, it was like I was opening a cupboard and putting in a jar of confidence, then another one, then another one. I become a more confident person slowly, not that swaggering, SOB advertising executive who could do anything. I was so arrogant in those days. But I began to feel better about things. I knew I was going somewhere. I started to feel that I could do more.
After two and a half years, I started working as a cook at a drop-in centre once a week. I was cooking lunch for 70 people. Then one of their case managers, whose job was to keep people in housing, quit. And they offered me a job. I hadn’t worked in five years. Two and half years of homelessness, two and a half years of recovery. I said, “Sure.”
Countering judgment and stigma
These days, I live in a one-bedroom apartment with a friend who I’m a caregiver for. I help run a housing first program and organize an annual human rights symposium. I do talks about homelessness and training sessions with people from all three levels of government, including local city councillors as well as police officers, firefighters, and paramedics. I talk to nursing students and hospital staff about poverty, stigma, and unconscious bias. “Are your judgements impeding your ability to give your best to the vulnerable?” Homeless people fill up emergency rooms, and they often treat people who are homeless in an inhumane way. Our health-care system doesn’t really understand the connections between homelessness and mental health. Our governments don’t, either.
Having an apartment is great, but the work gives me purpose, and I couldn’t have got here by myself. You can’t do anything without a home, that’s for sure. That’s why I’m big on housing first. You put somebody into housing, then you look after their needs. You can’t look after anybody’s needs on the street. And you can’t get by when 80 per cent of your income goes to housing.
People think that because you’ve spent time on the streets, you’ve lost something. In my case, I’ve gained so much wisdom. I’ve had a lot of success because I have lived experience. It helps you build trust. My experience gave me deep, deep empathy.
When you’re homeless, it exacerbates your mental illnesses. It compounds them by 10 times. Because there’s trauma just about every minute of every day. Because you don’t feel secure. But it’s not just housing. Having a place to sleep won’t make you healthy. You need a case manager. You need a counsellor. You need trauma-informed medical care. You might need to work on addictions. You need wraparound support. Otherwise, life could come crashing down on you again. Housing alone is not the answer. But it’s a big part of the answer.
Poverty can be just as traumatic as homelessness. People use so much energy every day and struggle so much, especially these days because of economic conditions. People are dropping from middle class into poverty — people who’ve never experienced poverty before — and people are dropping from poverty into homelessness. People really need access to the right services, because things are really difficult right now.
It’s rewarding to be helping keep people off the streets. Two years after I escaped homelessness, I came off my anti-depressants because I had a focus. That focus was other people. But for me, bridging the gap with my family is best thing about getting my life back together. Two of my children are in their 40s and one is 50 and we get along better than ever. They’ve all done really well for themselves. My daughter and I speak on a very cerebral level. My boys and I talk sports. One of my sons is in Winnipeg today for work and I’m going to see him for dinner tonight.
Did You Know?
- Roughly 60 percent of people who are homeless in Canada face mental health issues, according to a federal report that looked at 2020-2022 nationally coordinated point-in-time counts.
- According to the Homeless Hub online resource, mental illness can make you more susceptible to unemployment, poverty, social isolation and other challenges, all of which increase the risk of homelessness.
- Whether you are on the streets, in a shelter or some other liminal situation, the lack of stability and security can amplify psychological conditions.
- Access to safe and affordable housing, accompanied by a range of supports, is one of the most effective ways to end this cycle.
- A housing first approach is less expensive than public expenditures on health care, policing and other costs associated with homelessness, according to a CMAJ study.
Resource: Housing First in Canada
Author: As told to Dan Rubinstein, an Ottawa-based writer and editor who frequently writes about health issues.
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When I scroll through social media in the morning, groggily reaching for my phone an hour before my attendant care worker is scheduled to come and wake me up, I am almost always hit with some type of disability meme or post. They usually come in two flavours: one about how disabled people can do anything they put their minds to, or how the only disability that we have in life is a bad attitude, next to a picture of a disabled person defying the odds by scaling a mountain, skydiving, or something like that.
The second type of meme or post that I usually encounter is a magazine article detailing a beautiful person’s tragic accident that left them “wheelchair bound,” but “that doesn’t stop them from living their best life,” or something like that. These all-too-common representations in disability media leave us with very narrow views of disability. You either overcome disability and morph into a heroic figure, or you turn a tragic story into an uplifting one for others to draw out inspiration.
Not your tragic hero
We don’t only see these depictions in the media, they happen in real life as well. I can’t count on one hand the number of times that I have been approached by someone and told with their furrowed concerned brow, ‘I don’t know, if I were you, I think I might just kill myself,’ or the patronizing, ‘You don’t let your disability stop you, Andrew.’ There is rarely any space for a nuanced conversation about what it actually feels like to live in a disabled body, and let me tell you, it is so much more than those stereotypes.
One of the parts of living in a disabled body that is often discounted and entirely underrepresented is disability grief. My definition of disability grief is this: It is the grieving that comes as the result of living in a disabled body that copes with more loss and abrupt changes than most.
As a severely disabled person, I experience disability grief often – sometimes it comes up as a longing for something that I will never be able to do like running, jumping in the air and somersaulting, or even something as seemingly mundane as giving myself a shower. Other times, disability grief will come from some function that I lost the ability to do. I grieve that I can no longer use the toilet to go pee on my own and that I have to be catheterized everyday instead.
If I’m truly honest, the grief of losing that simple pleasure can’t be translated into words. I grieve that as I age in my disabled body, the pain is becoming more apparent, and it is becoming harder and harder to do many things that my disabled body used to do. All of this has had a major effect on my mental health; I find myself becoming more irritable, quicker to upset, and quicker to fall into depression.
Mental health professionals need to catch up
Kristen Williams
To understand disability grief and its effect on disabled people’s mental health better, I spoke to disabled psychotherapist (qualifying) Kristen Williams. She lives with cerebral palsy, anxiety, and major depressive disorder. She says that in her experience, disability grief is compounded.
“Disabled people are grieving the reality of our lives, and the things we cannot do, alongside our lost potential – the things we want but most probably will never have,” she says. I also asked her how mental health practitioners can help manage disability grief.
“The key is not to shy away from disability grief. Many people in the helping professions feel motivated to ‘fix’ or ‘help’ people, and sometimes this can look like offering solutions and encouragement, when we should be offering space and validation,” she says.
One of Williams’ takeaways is that therapists are not shielded from ableism – “a set of beliefs or practices that devalue and discriminate against people with physical, intellectual, or psychiatric disabilities and often rests on the assumption that disabled people need to be ‘fixed’ in one form or the other,” as defined by the Center for Disability Rights, a not-for-profit, community-based advocacy and service organization in the U.S.
Williams says that “clinicians experience it as much as they next person, so we have to examine it thoroughly, and strive to be anti-ableist in our practice.” I wanted to understand if Williams has seen a shift from disability grief to disability joy in her practice, and so I asked her.
“Part of moving towards disabled joy involves processing the sad, frustrating, and difficult moments that make up disability grief. Creating disabled joy looks like first understanding disabled grief.”
Getting to joy
I also spoke with my close friend Lorna Craig, who lives with multiple chronic illnesses including Lyme disease, endometriosis, and bipolar I. I asked her what disability grief looks like for her.
“For me, the way I usually experience it, because I have an acquired disability, it’s always comparing myself now to what my non-disabled self would be doing,” she says. “I think I spent many years grieving that person, and who she was, and what she might have been able to do.”
She continues, “These days I don’t know her. How do I know that she would have been a better version of myself?”
One of the key things that I gleaned from my conversation with Lorna was that disability grief is so much bigger than I think we understand it to be, and it is way deeper than just a buzz word. One of the things she said that I connect with so much is this: “Some days I wish my problems were more conventional instead of having a body that doesn’t cooperate and do what I want.” As someone living with invisible disabilities, Lorna highlighted that one of the things that brings her the most disability grief is not being believed by others.
I asked Lorna how all of this impacted her mental health and what she told me underscored just how important it is that we talk about disability grief and mental health.
“It ranges. Sometimes it can be a little irritating thought that stays with me throughout the day, and sometimes I can be curled up in a ball crying for days.”
I also asked her if she is seeing a shift from disability grief to disability joy.
“When it comes to my experience of chronic illness, I agree that you have to go through disability grief to find the joy. With my experience of mental illness, we haven’t really been given the chance to grieve and get to the joy. Sometimes, I think that mentally ill people don’t understand that they have a disability, and that they can claim that.”
Lorna and I talked for almost an hour about all of this, and she renewed in me just how important and ultimately complicated understanding disability grief and its effects on our mental health can be. Talking to both Lorna and Kristen, I learned that disability grief is different for each and every one of us living in disabled bodies and it is time that mental health professionals addressed their ableism so that they can understand disability grief.
I can’t wait to open my Instagram feed in the morning and see a disabled person with a caption that says, “I went to my therapist, and they helped me understand my relationship to disability grief.”
We’re not there just yet – but we could be.
Author: Andrew Gurza (they/he) is the author of the book, Notes From a Queer Cripple: How to Cultivate Queer Disabled Joy (and Be Hot While Doing It!), dozens of articles, and the viral hashtag #DisabledPeopleAreHot. He is a disability awareness consultant and podcast host.
