As last week marked Mental Health Awareness Week, it's a timely moment to reflect on how far the industry has come in supporting mental health within protection insurance.
At UnderwriteMe, we’ve made meaningful changes over the years to our approach—working to ensure that having a mental health condition is not a barrier to securing cover. Our goal is to make it easier for advisers to help their clients get the protection they need, regardless of their mental health history.
In this article, we revisit key insights from our Protection Platform Pulse report, exploring how data and product developments are shaping a more inclusive future for mental health in insurance.
In February 2020, UnderwriteMe made a pivotal adjustment to its underwriting engine’s question sets, to ensure mental health questions were separated from physical health. Since 2020, we have continued to build on our question set for mental health, most recently in 2025 adding a question around positive lifestyle changes to help manage mental health conditions. This can be seen below.
Recent data from the Protection Platform (1st January 2025 – 22nd April 2025):
✅ 18.7% of people applying through the platform, disclose anxiety, stress or depression.
🩺 20.1% disclose any form of mental health condition.
📊 1 in 4 people will experience a mental health problem of some kind each year.
🚀 90% of Life Cover and 93% of Critical Illness Cover (CI) applications with mental health disclosures were immediately accepted on our platform last year.
As mentioned in our Protection Platform Pulse report, the mental health charity ‘Mind’ reports that 1 in 4 people will experience a mental health problem of some kind each year, so it’s reassuring to see the number disclosing mental health through our platform is consistent with that. This is the sort of behaviour that is important, as it is vital that customers know that despite disclosing mental health, they can still get the insurance they require. This is backed up by our 2024 data highlighted in our Protection Platform Pulse report showing that 90% of Life Cover and 93% of Critical Illness Cover (CI) applications with mental health disclosures were immediately accepted on our platform last year, highlighting the industry’s move toward more inclusive underwriting. This highlights the great on-going work our insurer partners are doing in giving customers the fairest possible decision in the quickest possible time.
Mental health conditions have long carried a stigma, especially when it comes to gender, data taken from mentalhealth.org.uk highlights that women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with anxiety than men. Our data also backs this up, of the 18.7% of applications that contained a disclosure of anxiety, stress and depression, 12.3% were made by a female, whereas 6.4% were made by a male. People are becoming more open about discussing their mental health and we continue to see the number of disclosures continue to rise. We expect that trend to continue to rise as the stigma around mental health and disclosing mental health when applying for insurance reduces. Both advisers and their clients can see that the work to keep updating questions, and adding new, relevant ones in, are working in people’s favour, helping more individuals get the cover they need, rather than being used against them.
We’re committed to working closely with advisers to support more clients with mental health conditions in securing the protection they need. By sharing knowledge and building experience together, we can not only improve access to cover but also play a key role in reducing the stigma that still surrounds mental health — helping more people get covered with confidence.
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