"Factors in our environment are also pressing us more and more. There’s a breakdown of community – people are much more isolated and not asking for guidance and assistance.
"Plus, there’s a decline in religion or, moreover, what comes with that. In other words, a sense of meaning and purpose – this is vital for mental wellbeing.”
Murden adds: “It all comes down to self-awareness: knowing where your weak spots are and where you’ll need help. You can learn about yourself by using anything from tracking apps or an Apple watch to a simple notepad: logging things like your sleep and why you felt down at any point in the day.
“If we improve employees’ self-awareness and give them the tools for psychological development, they will perform better as they’ll understand where their weak spots are and where they need help.”
Product design & underwriting
Although there is little evidence of changes to underwriting practices with regards to mental health, that is not to say that work is not ongoing behind the scenes.
The Access to Insurance Working Group, which held its inaugural meeting last September at the Department for Work and Pensions, is committed to making protection and travel insurance more accessible for people with chronic health conditions and disabilities.
And with mental health representing a leading cause of claim for income protection, there is a greater contributory factor in IP underwriting.
Mr Harper explains: “For people with a recent history of more serious mental health issues, for example those which have led to time off work, insurers may seek medical evidence from the GP and, if not accepted on normal terms, are likely to apply an exclusion.”
The Access to Insurance working group is trying to make underwriting more transparent by “debunking some of the myths about claims and taking in language that people understand,” explains Harper.
“We need to ensure that the questions we write into intelligent reflexive underwriting quote and apply systems are the right ones, using the right language – and we strike a balance between technology and the human touch.
“We are now seeing more providers apply set or reviewable exclusions where, if there isn’t a recurrance for a specified period, the exclusion will be lifted. Around half of reviewable exclusions are for mental health conditions.”
Meanwhile, John Downes, director, underwriting & claims, at Vitality, highlights a problem.
“One of the biggest barriers to change is around treating each person as an individual and finding a better way to elicit accurate information from them to enable us to underwrite the risk more appropriately with this in mind.”
He explains that the wide spectrum in the severity of mental health conditions makes it difficult to provide accurate information within the confines of an underwriting question set as conventional mental health terminology does not always capture the nuances of individual circumstances.
