A daughter calls her mother's physician.

She is worried.

Over the past two years, her mother has become increasingly withdrawn. She misses appointments, forgets to pay bills, and has given money to people she met online. The house is becoming cluttered. Food expires in the refrigerator. Friends no longer visit.

"Can you help?" she asks.

The physician listens carefully and shares her concerns. However, her mother remains capable of making her own healthcare decisions.

The daughter then calls a lawyer. Her mother has a power of attorney in place, but it cannot simply be activated because her children disagree with her choices. She continues to meet the legal standard for capacity.

She calls the bank. Privacy legislation limits what can be discussed.

She contacts community resources. There are concerns, but no immediate crisis.

Everyone is acting appropriately. The physician is respecting patient autonomy. The lawyer is upholding the law. The bank is complying with privacy obligations. Each participant is operating within their professional responsibilities. Yet despite everyone's best efforts, the family remains without a solution. Their mother is not incapable. She is not in immediate danger. She does not meet the threshold for involuntary intervention. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly clear that she is struggling.

Many families know this experience because they are living it.

Over the course of my career, I have come to believe that this is one of the most significant challenges families are facing, and one that receives far less attention than it deserves. The most difficult situations are rarely those in which a person is clearly capable or clearly incapable. They arise during the years in between, when vulnerability is increasing but existing systems remain largely organized around legal, medical, and administrative thresholds.

Families experience decline as a gradual process. Our institutions often respond only when a threshold has been crossed.

A Growing Population Living Between Independence and Incapacity

People are living longer than ever before. Medical advances have transformed many acute illnesses into chronic conditions. Families are smaller and more geographically dispersed. Adult children often live in different cities, provinces, or countries from their aging parents. Social isolation is becoming increasingly common. For older adults, this may stem from the loss of a spouse, declining mobility, retirement, or geographic separation from family. At the same time, younger generations are experiencing their own forms of isolation. Despite being more digitally connected than any generation before them, many teenagers and young adults report increasing loneliness, weaker community ties, and less face-to-face interaction. Technology has made it easier to connect, but not necessarily easier to belong.

Daily life has also become significantly more complex. Banking, healthcare, government services, communication, and commerce are increasingly conducted online. Technology has created tremendous opportunities, but it has also introduced new barriers and new risks. Fraud schemes have become more sophisticated, and artificial intelligence is making impersonation and financial scams increasingly difficult to detect.

As a result, many people are spending years, and sometimes decades, navigating varying degrees of vulnerability while continuing to live independently. This reality does not fit neatly within many of the systems that were designed to support them. Many of our healthcare, legal, and social frameworks were developed at a time when life expectancy was shorter, periods of dependency were often brief, and family support networks were more readily available. Today, we see many people spending years managing mild cognitive impairment, chronic mental illness, addiction, grief, social isolation, or increasing functional limitations while remaining legally capable of directing their own affairs. The result is a growing population of individuals whose needs fall somewhere between independence and incapacity.

Capacity and Vulnerability Are Not the Same Thing

One of the most important distinctions families encounter is the difference between capacity and vulnerability. Capacity is a legal concept. It determines whether an individual can make their own decisions and direct their own affairs. Vulnerability is broader and often far more difficult to define. A person can be vulnerable while remaining fully capable.

A recently widowed spouse may understand financial concepts perfectly well while feeling overwhelmed by responsibilities that were once shared. An older adult may continue living independently while struggling with medications, technology, transportation, and social isolation. A person living with depression may understand the consequences of refusing treatment while lacking the motivation, energy, or support necessary to care for themselves effectively. Similarly, a retired executive experiencing mild cognitive impairment may remain capable of discussing investment strategies and financial concepts while becoming increasingly susceptible to financial exploitation. Family members may recognize subtle changes in judgment years before any formal finding of incapacity would ever be considered.

These situations are not uncommon. In fact, they are becoming increasingly common. Yet many of our systems are designed to respond to incapacity rather than vulnerability. If vulnerability can exist long before incapacity, are we asking the right questions of our healthcare, legal, and social systems?

Those Living in No Man's Land

The challenges associated with vulnerability extend well beyond aging and cognitive decline. Consider the aging parents of an adult son struggling with substance use. For years, they move between periods of hope and despair. There are stretches of stability followed by relapses that undo months of progress. During periods of active addiction, their son drains savings, refuses treatment, disappears from contact, or places himself at risk. During periods of stability, he remains fully capable of making his own decisions. His parents spend years searching for answers. They consult healthcare providers, explore treatment options, seek legal advice, and desperately try to help. Again and again, they encounter the same reality: their son retains the right to make his own choices. The emotional burden is immense. They are caught between respecting his autonomy and fearing for his safety. They experience a form of anticipatory grief, watching someone they love struggle while feeling powerless to intervene.

The circumstances are different from those facing the widow or the retired executive, but the underlying challenge is remarkably similar. All three individuals occupy a space where vulnerability is evident, yet meaningful intervention remains difficult. Healthcare providers may recognize concerns but lack authority to intervene. Lawyers may identify risks while remaining obligated to follow the instructions of a capable client. Family members may be deeply concerned but have limited ability to help. No single system is failing. Rather, these situations reveal the limitations of systems that were designed around clear thresholds while human vulnerability develops gradually and often unpredictably.

One reason these situations are so difficult is that many of our healthcare, legal, and social systems are organized around events. Healthcare systems respond to diagnoses, hospitalizations, and acute medical concerns. Legal frameworks focus on capacity assessments, substitute decision-makers, powers of attorney, representation agreements, committeeship applications, and other identifiable legal thresholds. Mental health legislation is often triggered by concerns related to safety, deterioration, or risk. These frameworks serve important purposes. They protect autonomy, individual rights, and personal freedom. The challenge is that human vulnerability rarely emerges as a single event.

Families do not experience decline through legal tests and statutory definitions. They experience it through countless small observations that accumulate over time. A parent repeats the same story several times in a single conversation. A spouse becomes increasingly isolated after a loss. A loved one starts missing appointments. Bills are left unpaid. The refrigerator becomes empty. The home becomes neglected. Trusted friendships disappear. Family members begin worrying long before a legal or medical threshold is reached. This is where the gap emerges.

Our institutions are often designed around thresholds. Human decline unfolds as a process.

The Human Cost of Waiting

Families frequently describe a similar experience when they seek help. Their concerns are acknowledged. The risks are recognized. Yet they are often told, directly or indirectly, that the situation does not yet meet the threshold for intervention. As a result, many families find themselves waiting while an aging parent becomes increasingly isolated, a spouse's cognitive decline progresses, or a loved one cycles through addiction, mental illness, or periods of instability.

Sometimes the crisis arrives in the form of a hospitalization. Sometimes it is financial exploitation. Sometimes it is caregiver burnout, self-neglect, housing instability, or a preventable decline in health.

By the time intervention becomes available, opportunities for earlier support may have already been lost.

We encourage preventative medicine, preventative financial planning, and preventative public health measures. Yet many of the systems surrounding aging, vulnerability, and decision-making remain largely reactive. What might be possible if we focused more attention on the years before crisis occurs?

Where Advisors Fit

As financial advisors, our role is not to diagnose medical conditions or provide legal opinions. However, we occupy a unique position within a client's life. We maintain relationships that span decades. We witness retirement, widowhood, caregiving transitions, business sales, inheritances, family conflict, illness, and eventual estate settlement. We frequently collaborate with lawyers, accountants, trustees, and family members who form part of a client's support network. This long-term perspective allows us to observe gradual changes that may not be visible during a single medical appointment or legal consultation. More importantly, it creates opportunities to start conversations before a crisis occurs. 

Powers of attorney, representation agreements, trusted contacts, family meetings, advance care planning, and discussions about future support systems are often viewed as planning documents. In reality, they are tools that help preserve autonomy by creating structures of support before they become urgently needed. Their greatest value may not lie in what happens after capacity is lost, but in helping families navigate the years when vulnerability is increasing and difficult decisions are beginning to emerge.

What Could Change?

Recognizing the gap is only the first step. The more important question is what we do about it.

The challenges facing vulnerable people intersect healthcare, law, finance, housing, mental health, caregiving, and social support. They cannot be addressed by any one profession acting alone. However, there are several opportunities to improve how we support individuals and families navigating the years between independence and incapacity.

  1. Shift the conversation from capacity to vulnerability. Much of our current framework is designed to determine whether someone is capable or incapable. While that distinction remains important, it is often not the question families are actually asking. More often, families want to know how to support someone who is becoming increasingly vulnerable while preserving their autonomy and dignity. Recognizing vulnerability earlier creates opportunities for support before a situation reaches a crisis point and encourages a more nuanced understanding of the challenges people face as they age, navigate mental illness, struggle with substance use, or experience significant life transitions.
  2. Embrace supported decision-making. For many people, the goal is not to transfer decision-making authority to someone else. The goal is to help them continue making decisions safely for as long as possible. Many individuals do not need someone to make decisions for them; they need trusted people to help them understand information, evaluate options, coordinate care, and navigate increasingly complex systems. As our population ages and life becomes more complicated, supported decision-making may become an increasingly important bridge between complete independence and formal substitute decision-making.
  3. Build stronger bridges between professions. Families often find themselves moving between healthcare providers, lawyers, financial institutions, social workers, community agencies, and government programs. Each professional may see an important piece of the picture, but few see the whole picture. Greater collaboration could help identify risks earlier, reduce gaps in communication, and create more coordinated support plans. The families who navigate these situations most successfully are often those supported by a team of professionals working toward a shared objective rather than operating in isolation.
  4. Recognize social isolation as a significant risk factor. Some of the most vulnerable individuals are not experiencing severe medical or cognitive decline. They are simply alone. Isolation affects physical health, mental health, financial vulnerability, and overall quality of life. It can increase susceptibility to scams, worsen depression, accelerate cognitive decline, contribute to substance use disorders, and make it more difficult to access support when challenges arise. While social isolation is often associated with older adults, it is increasingly affecting younger generations as well. In an era of social media and digital connection, many teenagers and young adults report unprecedented levels of loneliness and disconnection. Regardless of age, the absence of meaningful human connection can magnify vulnerability.
  5. Expand our definition of planning. As professionals, we often focus on legal documents, financial plans, and healthcare directives. These are important, but they are only part of the picture. We should also be asking who would notice if this person stopped answering the phone, who checks in regularly, who is part of their support network, and who will advocate for them if they cannot advocate for themselves. These questions may be just as important as any planning document because vulnerability is often first identified through relationships, not paperwork.

Looking Forward

For generations, we have built systems around independence and incapacity, as though they are the only two states that matter. Increasingly, it is the space between them that deserves our attention. That is where families struggle. That is where professionals often feel powerless. And that is where some of the greatest opportunities to preserve dignity, autonomy, and quality of life still exist.

Alysha Tse, TEP, FEA, CFP, CLU, CHS, CIM, MTI, MFA-P Wealth Advisor, Associate Portfolio Manager Chernick James Tse & Associates Wealth Counsel, Richardson Wealth

Richardson Wealth Limited is a subsidiary of iA Financial Corporation Inc. and is not affiliated with James Richardson & Sons, Limited. Richardson Wealth is a trademark of James Richardson & Sons, Limited and Richardson Wealth Limited is a licensed user of the mark. Richardson Wealth Limited, Member Canadian Investor Protection Fund.