Editorial: Canadian P&C industry’s mental health in 2025. Who’s helping the helpers?

Editor’s Note: If you have not done so already, I encourage you to please complete Canadian Underwriter’s 2025 Mental Health Survey. We’re trying to establish mental health benchmarks so that people working in the Canadian P&C insurance industry get the support and resources they need.

Two dynamics combined to shine a spotlight on the mental health of Canadian property and casualty insurance professionals last summer.

At a time when the P&C industry was wrestling with the effects of a national labour shortage, four natural catastrophes over 28 days last summer led to 228,000 insurance claims being filed. To put that into perspective, Canadians made 160,000 insurance claims in all of 2023.

It just so happened that Canadian Underwriter went into the field at that time with our inaugural 2024 Mental Health Survey. Not surprisingly, Canadian P&C industry professionals reported feeling anxious and stressed. And roughly 15% to 17% of the 836 surveyed were in a truly dark place, reporting either substance abuse, anger management issues, or suicidal thoughts.

Many didn’t want to talk about it, nor did they do anything about it. Asked how much time Canadian P&C employees took off last year to cope with a mental health concern — either their own or someone else’s — 58% reported taking no time off at all.

The reasons cited in the survey were, frankly, heart-breaking to read.

“I don’t want to be seen as weak, held back for promotions, or seen as not being capable,” one respondent wrote. “It’s a career-limiting maneuver.”

Said another: “Management doesn’t care about mental health. They just care that they have someone to assign an overabundance of claims to.”

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

CU knows everyone in Canada’s P&C industry takes great pride in helping people through crises. Industry professionals support Canadians through the worst times in their lives.

They help people whose homes have gone up in flames. Perhaps their clients’ or customers’ family members have been seriously injured in car crashes. Or a hurricane floods a company’s operations, forcing it to close for months.

But who is helping the helpers?

Answers in last year’s CU Mental Health Survey suggest the industry has a lot of work to do when it comes to supporting their own mental health.

We are running our survey again this year. I encourage you to fill it out, if you haven’t already. It’s short. It’s anonymous. And it’s designed to help us establish benchmarks to measure how P&C professionals are coping with a variety of pressures that may affect their mental health. These may include customer expectations, management expectations, workplace culture, time management, labour shortages, etc.

Our survey is also designed to help employers support their greatest resource — their people.

Questions in the survey include awareness around mental health resources available, as well as potential gaps in the resources. Armed with this information, employers will be in a better spot to help employees feel like valuable, contributing members of the team, while still managing their mental health concerns.

Many thanks in advance for filling out the survey for us. At CU, it’s our way of trying to help the helpers. You’re not alone.