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Nobody wants to be homeless. Nobody wants to find themselves on the streets, without a place to go. But many end up in this position anyway. These people are often reduced to statistics, studies conducted by researchers to be able to quantify other people’s experiences: people who have experienced homelessness are two to three times more likely to struggle with poor mental health. Of the hundreds of thousands of unhoused individuals in Canada, one-third of them suffer from a mental illness. Around one-fourth suffer from both a mental illness and an addiction. These statistics can be found everywhere.
But rarely does anyone stop thinking of them as “the homeless,” and see them as individuals with their own stories instead. Being seen as part of a nameless mass can strip a person of their identity, making them even more susceptible to mental deterioration. A photographer named Leah den Bok does a remarkable job of humanizing the homeless in her book “Nowhere to Call Home,” capturing the unique experiences that people have on the streets. Not only does she share their conversations, she includes the name and a photo of each person, sharing with the world the identity that so many of them had lost. In one interview, she approached a panhandler in Toronto. This is not an uncommon sight; everyone passes at least one person asking for money as they walk the streets. But she started up a conversation with him instead of ignoring him, and his story unravelled. The man’s name was Ronny, and he found himself homeless after turning to alcohol and drugs to deal with the loss of his daughter to cancer and his wife to suicide. However, despite these tragic losses, he managed to find the strength to quit his addictions after realizing it had destroyed his life. His traumas alone are difficult enough to recover from, but he was also “[treated] as if he were a thing, rather than a person” by passerbys on the streets. Without people to support him, whether with money, resources or morale, it became all the more difficult to find a way out of this dark chapter of his life.
Experiencing homelessness is not the end of a life. Learning about people’s individual experiences with it can help us humanize them and change our mindset when we see them on the streets. So next time you see an underdressed man sleeping against a building, an elderly person holding out a small hat filled with coins, or a discouraged youth sitting on the ground with a sign, don’t judge them too fast. Don't turn the other way. Instead, try to think about the unfortunate series of events that may have led to their current situation, and offer them a helping hand. These are the people who need to be reminded that they still matter, that others still care. One meal, one conversation, one act of kindness, can help someone more than anyone could ever know.
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