That works against the way psychiatric disability works – you’re continuing to put more pressure and expectation on the person. They become more and more stressed and agitated by that, rather than placing them into the workplace quickly in an appropriate workplace environment, providing the support directly to them, their employer and their colleagues. to enable them to continue operating as effectively as possible in the workplace. Holland has a tremendous rate of success in relation to the employment of people with psychiatric disability, their participation rate is double what we achieve in Australia, where only 27 per cent of people with a psychiatric disability have employment. So what are they doing differently? Well, they do their employment support fundamentally the reverse of what we do. We tend to put all our eggs into the pre-employment process.

So what are the lessons out of this for claim management? I think Amalia has touched on a number of them. It’s around the quality of the engagement and the relationship. It’s about being quick to respond. So that any anxiety developing in the mind of the person concerned in minimised. It about capturing their story once, not having it repeated over and over and over. Not subjecting them to more and more assessments. Putting probably putting greater reliance on the evidence provided by treating physicians. If someone’s been hospitalised with a mental health condition, then that’s very, very strong evidence they’ve got a strong claim. If they’ve spent some weeks in a psychiatric unit in Australia, getting in there is harder than getting into the Australian cricket team. Beds are in short supply, so you have to be pretty unwell to be admitted in any state. Colin Tate: John, did our industry statistics surprise you?

John Mendoza: It didn’t surprise me that stress, as Lisa [Munsie] says – its not a mental health disorder. But historically it’s been the catch all, it’s the euphemism. For the First World War it was ‘shell shock’. You know there were lots of soldiers returning to this nation with shell shock, what they had of course was post-traumatic stress disorder. Many of those poor fellows went on and suicided as we know through the ‘20s and ‘30s, because there wasn’t any effective treatment. I would certainly encourage the industry to get rid of the concept of ‘stress’ as a legitimate claim. Eliminate that from the nomenclature, and start to train people that really that’s not going to be accepted, what people have to have is one of the M5 Project categories of illness, which are coming out shortly. Damian Hill: John you’ve [spoken before] about the episodic nature of some mental illnesses, how they can be incredibly valuable to the workforce for the vast majority of the year but at times not so.