Mental health report: Where P&C professionals turn for help

Canada’s property and casualty insurance professionals are giving their companies’ mental health resources a middling grade, identifying Employment Assistance Programs (EAP) as their Number 1 resource available for handling their mental health concerns.

“First it needs to be acknowledged that it is ok to have mental health issues, and a path to being healthy again is possible through offered resources,” one industry professional writes in Canadian Underwriter’s 2024 Mental Health Survey.

“When I had mental health issues, I sought out my own help through my doctor. He referred me to a mental health department. I went on my lunch hours to a social worker available here in town.

“My employer [attributed] my improvement [to] his mindset, and kept telling me how I was improving! I was going crazy because of lazy co-workers, and [from the employer’s perspective], it was me who had the problem.”

Made possible with the assistance of Allstate Canada, CU’s 2024 Mental Health Survey surveyed 836 P&C industry professionals in August. When the survey was conducted, the industry was on the ground dealing with four major natural catastrophes during a four-week span in July and August. The industry reported dealing with 228,000 claims during that time, 60,000 more claims than it had dealt with in all of 2023.

That’s obviously elevated reports of stress and concerns about mental health in the survey.

Thirty-eight percent of Canadian P&C insurance industry professionals responding to the survey report feeling highly stressed or acute stress. And 30% rate their mental health as a 7 or 8 on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being a complete inability to function).

Thirty-seven per cent report actively seeking mental health resources right now, or have sought them in the past.

Related: Suffering in silence: Canada’s P&C professionals and mental health

Available resources

And so, where do people turn when they are stressed and/or have mental health concerns?

Asked to choose from a list of eight possible mental health resources available at their companies, 70% identified EAP programs. Next came digital health information (42%), followed by paid leave programs (30%) and webinars (27%).

Seventeen per cent of those surveyed say they have taken an extended leave of absence — i.e., short-term or long-term disability — at some point during their careers because of their mental health. The percentage was highest (at 19%) for those P&C professionals with 10 or fewer years in the business.

Although recognition of EAP program availability ranked at the top of the list for all demographic categories, a considerable variance of reported availability existed between industry groups.

For example, those in insurers’ administration or operations departments showed the highest awareness of EAP program availability (at 94%), whereas only 51% of those in brokers sales cited knowledge of EAP availability.

In general, scores for knowledge about EAP program availability tended to be higher for insurance company roles in the industry — scores ranged between 81% and 94% — compared to brokerage roles, where scores ranged between 51% and 58%.

Only 59% of people with 10 or fewer years in the P&C industry cited knowledge of EAP program availability, whereas 76% of those with 11-to-20 years in the industry did.

Quality of resources?

Asked to rate the quality of their company’s mental health resources, 40% give them a middling grade (neither high nor low quality). Thirty percent rank them as either high or very high quality, and 17% rank them as low or extremely low quality.

Broken down by industry demographic categories, insurers’ admin or ops teams were the ones most likely to give the resources high grades (45%), while broker salespeople were most likely to give them the worst grades (22%).

Within organizations, senior executives and managers were most likely to rate available mental health resources highly (38%), while customer-facing roles in the organization tended to give them the lowest grades (25%).

P&C industry professionals who identified as being part of a group whose workplace rights are protected under the Canadian Human Rights Act were more likely than average to rate the quality of mental health resources as low or extremely low. The survey average for the lowest scores was 17%, whereas for rights-protected groups, 20% rated the quality of mental health resources as low or extremely low.

Classes of people legally protected from workplace discrimination include race, colour, religion, national origin, sex (including gender, sexual orientation and gender identity), pregnancy, childbirth, age, physical or mental disability, veteran status, genetic information and citizenship.

Editor’s Note: CU’s 2024 Mental Health Survey contains more than 250 verbatim answers to an open-ended question about perceived gaps in mental health resources. Tomorrow, CU will explore some of the points raised in these answers for how to improve mental health resources for Canada’s P&C insurance industry.

Feature image courtesy of iStock.com/fizkes