If you had a blood test that did that it, then everyone would be happy. But, because it’s a definition of a clinical picture, it’s become controversial especially because it might mean that, in the US, people get medicated. In Australia, they’d probably get counselling or those sorts of supports first before that would be considered. Or things like fish oil, which we’ve been researching.

It’s a very important conceptual breakthrough in psychiatry. But some people have raised the issue, what does that mean for insurers? Would you be excluded from getting insurance if you had this risk syndrome and then recovered?

Mark Woodward: The attraction of group insurance is it provides breadth of cover, blanket cover and removes the specific nature of somebody’s experience like that. What we’ll see and something we’re looking at actively at the moment is taking this notion a bit further back, and I wonder if there might be a segué to what you’ve just been describing. It’s this description of well-being.

If we can better understand our general condition, our general health. Eat well. Exercise well. Engage well in society. All these are precursors to the topic we’re discussing now. There are ways that that can be managed much more efficiently and much more effectively.

We’ve seen evidence of that in the US. We’ll be supporting this, absolutely lock stock and barrel. If there’s anything I’m taking away from this, it’s that I don’t know what the government’s going to do, but we’ll do something.

Michael Rooney: From a trustee perspective, there’s a lean from the insurers towards exclusion if something’s happened. If a guy was given an anti-depressant five years ago for six months – perhaps the doctor just automatically put him on them. Then there’s a mental disorder exclusion.

We’ve had a couple of interesting discussions with underwriters about those types of things where something happened for a short time: a car accident; a family member died suddenly. And then the person is punished for life because of that short-term diagnosis from a GP, not even a specialist. We do see that a fair bit.

Mark Woodward: It’s a technical narrow reaction from an insurer to something that needs a much more strategic long-term view. We see the evidence that this is about the long-term, and yet all we worry about is whether we get the numbers for the quarter. So we have to change an industry’s mindset to what is a lifelong social issue. It’s not like selling Mars bars.