Recently, I sat down with one of our day guests at the Upper Room Mission. He desperately needs a safe place to sleep. A bed is available. Our shelter is warm, secure, and staffed by people who genuinely care about his well-being. Yet night after night, he chooses to sleep outside.

At first, that doesn’t seem to make sense.

As we talked, however, a different story began to emerge. He lives with overwhelming anxiety, grief and fear. Over time, alcohol has become the way he copes with those feelings. Our shelter is a dry facility, which means alcohol isn’t permitted inside. The barrier isn’t that he fears the shelter itself. He fears losing the one thing he believes helps him manage his feelings. In his mind, accepting a bed also means facing emotions he doesn’t yet know how to live with.

That conversation stayed with me.

It reminded me that what we see on the surface is rarely the whole story. Homelessness and addiction are often visible, but the fear, trauma, loneliness, grief, and hopelessness that lie beneath them are not. Before someone can accept housing, treatment, or even a safe place to sleep, they may first need help believing they can live without the coping mechanisms that have helped them survive.

Perhaps this is what despair looks like.

Not simply the absence of hope, but the feeling of being trapped between the life you have and the life you’re afraid you cannot live without.

Walk through almost any Canadian community today and you’ll see signs of struggle. A tent tucked behind a building. Someone sleeping in a doorway. An ambulance responding to another overdose. A neighbour quietly battling addiction while trying to hold life together.

These moments can feel like separate problems—homelessness, addiction, mental illness, poverty—but what if they are connected by something deeper?

Researchers have begun using the term “Deaths of Despair” to describe deaths resulting from suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-related disease. The phrase was first introduced by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton while studying rising mortality rates in the United States. Although Canada’s story is different in some ways, the concept has become increasingly relevant here as our country continues to experience one of the worst drug toxicity crises in its history.

But the term isn’t really about how people die.

It’s about why people begin to lose hope.

Despair rarely arrives overnight. It often grows quietly over months or years as life’s burdens begin to accumulate. A relationship falls apart. A job is lost. Mental health begins to decline. Physical pain becomes chronic. Loneliness settles in. Purpose starts to fade. Hope becomes increasingly difficult to hold onto.

For some, substances become a way to numb emotional pain. For others, alcohol becomes the only way to quiet anxious thoughts or simply make it through another day. Some gradually withdraw from friends and family. Others lose employment or housing after years of instability—not because they lacked character or determination, but because the support they needed wasn’t there when they were still within reach.

By the time we see someone living on the street or struggling with addiction, despair has often been taking root for years.

Canada’s opioid crisis has made this reality impossible to ignore. Since 2016, tens of thousands of Canadians have died from opioid toxicity, with British Columbia experiencing some of the highest rates in the country. Yet behind every overdose is more than a statistic. There is a person who once had dreams, relationships, strengths, and hopes for the future. There is a son or daughter, a parent, a sibling, a friend, or a neighbour.

The crisis is not simply about drugs.

It is about lives that have become disconnected from the relationships, stability, purpose, and hope that help people flourish.

Perhaps that is where we need to change the conversation.

For years, much of our public discussion has focused on responding to crisis. How do we reduce overdoses? How do we respond to homelessness? How do we treat addiction? These are important questions, and they deserve our attention.

But what if they aren’t the first questions we should ask?

What if we started with something deeper?

What causes people to lose hope in the first place?

And perhaps even more importantly:

What helps people flourish before they ever reach crisis?

These questions matter because despair doesn’t only affect people experiencing homelessness. It can take root in any life. It can be found in boardrooms and classrooms, in retirement homes and stable neighbourhoods, in workplaces, churches, and families that appear to have everything together.

Homelessness and addiction often make despair visible.

But they rarely create it.

More often, they are the visible chapters of a much longer, invisible story—a story of accumulated loss, trauma, isolation, broken relationships, declining mental health, and diminishing hope.

If we truly want to reduce homelessness, addiction, and overdose deaths, we cannot focus only on the moment of crisis. We must also pay attention to the conditions that lead people there. We need to become better at recognizing despair while hope can still be restored.

At the Upper Room Mission, we believe every person is created with inherent dignity, worth, and the capacity to flourish. We believe no one should be defined by the worst chapter of their life. While we cannot solve every problem, we can be part of creating communities where people are seen, known, valued, and given opportunities to rebuild their lives.

Because the opposite of despair isn’t simply survival.

It’s hope.

And hope is where flourishing begins.

Looking Ahead

As we are exploring ways to help people exit homelessness, addiction and poverty, we are on a journey to better understand the current solutions we provide and find ways to improve our outcomes. This article is the first in a series exploring Human Flourishing—what it means, why it matters, and how it can reshape the way we think about homelessness, addiction, and community care. In the next article, we’ll explore the science of human flourishing and why helping people build lives worth living may be one of the most important ways we can prevent despair before it becomes crisis. Subscribe to our mailing list to stay connected to this story.

What do you think?

Have we as a community become too focused on responding to homelessness and addiction after they occur, and not focused enough on preventing the despair that often comes first? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Leave us a comment.

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