Kathryn (00:03):
Hi everyone. We are on season five, episode 12. We have Catherine Betley with us from Grief Chat today. Hi Kathryn.

Catherine (00:10):
Hi there

Kathryn (00:11):
Today. We’re going to be talking about grief and bereavements things that many of us have experienced, especially over the last few years and how Catherine has built a company to, support people during this time. This is the Practical Protection Podcast. So how are you both doing, I know your plans of the weekend have changed quite drastically, Catherine, and I don’t know if that’s something that we want to talk about, not talk about.

Catherine (00:35):
I think it’s something we’re all used to now with the virus the last couple of years. So yes, it was a quiet weekend, not the way it was originally planned.

Kathryn (00:43):
Well hopefully, hopefully you’ll get chance to do whatever you are planning again at some point. And how are you doing Roy?

Roy (00:49):
Yeah. No, very good. Very good. Just, depressed that the rains come down again.

Kathryn (00:53):
Oh, did you guys get hailstone? We’ve had quite a few days of hailstone as well. We,

Roy (00:56):
We had snow on Fridays. Unbelievable. You never, you never get snow in West London. Oh,

Kathryn (01:02):
I was going to say we had hailstone up here in the, in the Northeast and I was on my phone to my assistant. She lives in Florence and she was saying to me, she goes, we got hailstone in Florence and obviously Italian weather. They were just like, what is this? You know, they just had, they were all very much hidden inside, which, uh, I don’t blame them because I absolutely hibernate when the hailstones come out. So let’s get straight into things then camping. Because I know there’s a lot for us talking about. So I suppose it was a really good idea to start off. Now I know that people may have, uh, come across you and met you a little bit in the insurance space through, uh, recently you on cover with, uh, Johnny Timpson, having a good chat on there about what it is that you guys do. But can you providers with some information, sorry, what’s led you to focusing upon supporting people, especially if there are, um, if experiencing grief and bereavements

Catherine (01:45):
Oh sure. And, and like all of these things, there’s a story behind it. So I left university having absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with myself with a very medioc history degree, no particular direction. Um, and that’s a friend of mine said there is an ORP, a charity locally in Bolton where I’m originally from, if you can’t tell, I went school with PK, he was a couple years a book, but we were working with her together and she said, you know, you, you seem to be interested in helping people. It’s, you know, it’s a nice job. Why don’t you, why don’t you have a go? So I went to a children’s, um, a children’s fencing charity where we did all kinds of interesting and fun things with kids. And I was there for five years and then end up as the CEO and expanded that charity fairly dramatically from being a really tiny local charity to be in a regional charity, um, which in the nineties was a lot of fun.

Catherine (02:34):
There was a lot of money around the grant funding was, um, fairly abundant and, uh, and we had free rent really to, to tie all kinds of interest in therapeutic models with children. Um, and, and I, it really captured my imagination. Not, not so much the children faint enough, um, but actually the, the whole ethos of, of building services to provide help for people. So from there, I went to cruise bereavement care, um, which is the largest bereavement in the UK. Um, started up as a, a regional manager in the Northwest and ends up as the UK director of services some 12 years later. Um, and at that point I was responsible for running all the help lines and the, the face to face services across the UK, um, and info myself quite frustrated because the demand for services was so high that running a team of 6,000 volunteers at the time, we just simply couldn’t get people to speak to a bereave councilmen in less than, than several weeks, sometimes several months.

Catherine (03:30):
Um, and to me that was a soft, immense frustration. So I retired gracefully from that role and, and went for the countryside to bring up four children. Hence my comments about not, I particularly, I didn’t have lots of them myself. Um, yeah. And, and just realized very quickly that I missed being part of, of, of a movement for change really, I suppose. Um, my entire career up until this point has been spent in the terrorist sector, trying to change things were better. Um, and I really stuff. So within a couple of years, I’d set up my original business professional help. Um, and that was designed to improve mental health services across all kinds of industries, but very specifically starting off within the charity sector and that has grown and changed over the years, but really held on to that frustration of how do we connect brief people to a counselor?

Catherine (04:23):
You know, most brief people don’t need counseling. They need some reassurance, they need some advice, they need some information, but actually they need it quickly when, when they want it. And when they’ve, they’ve phoned that co to, to reach out. Um, so I, I kind of reached out to a friend of mine who used to work with me at crew and said, do you know anything about web or instant messaging? Um, and she said, actually, this is something that’s happening within the charity sector, but largely for either retail conversations or customer service conversations. Um, and I said, well, I, I really like to try to use it for therapeutic use. Um, and she said, well, that’s really fascinating. So, okay, she’s now head of brief chats and we have been refining the product really, and taking it out to the market for the last few years.

Kathryn (05:09):
That sounds incredible. And, um, and I think it’s one of those things as well. That probably, I don’t know, I wonder if you sort instinctively, some people think, well, a web chat to do bereavements or to do grief or something. Its kind of, it it’s possibly feels as a, if it has like a, um, it doesn’t have the empathy, you know, we always talk about being em, empathetic and chatting with people and people with people. And this is kind of like a little bit removed from that because, but obviously, and I know obviously at some point I’ll share there’s some, your statistics and I’ve used it, which are incredible. Um, but it obviously works for a lot of people, doesn’t it?

Catherine (05:41):
It does. So we’ve been back in years and years ago, I met a TA called John Davis who runs a charity called Much Loved. And he started off what we considered at the time, um, pardon affairs as Facebook for dead people, um, online tributes and online memorials. So it was pictures of people who died and, and whereas of remembering those people from bereave people and at the time it was so wacky and so far removed from anything that we’d seen before, which was very face to face, you know, bereavement services was about being in a group or meeting one to one with a counselor. And I suppose it’s a kind of natural extensions that digitize of everything, you know, back in 2009, I think it was when I met John, we didn’t have smartphones and cameras. You remember download on, on the sort of broadband trying to download a picture on it took three hours.

Catherine (06:30):
So we just moved on fast in terms the technologies and actually the idea of the Grief Chat while it was very much born out frustration, um, was actually born on a beach, um, because my middle daughter was messaging me through, I think it was messenger or one of the instant messaging apps. And she just passed me until she got an answer about something that teenagers wanted to know about. Um, and it really literally kind of was like a light bulb that went on. This is how we do it. We can do this through instant messaging. And it didn’t matter, particularly whether it was through messenger or some other form of, of chat. Whoever we could facilitate past conversations was, was the key to it all. So yeah, it is a little bit removed. It’s one step removed from the, the face to face support, but actually a lot of people find face to face support, quite intimidating. You need an lot of co to pitch up in some old office and say I’m really struggling. Um, so the anonymity of Greek chats and the immediacy of Grief Chat is really what is, you know, it’s at the heart of it. And we’ve worked very, very hard for a long time now to make sure that our counselors can translate that tone of voice into text, which is a real skill in itself, but everyone else, absolutely.

Roy (07:40):
Kathryn we’re in an industry that sells a lot of, um, protection policies. And that, and that’s a good thing. Were you surprised when you came across advisors who were finding it very difficult to deal with, uh, you know, the, the, the end products so to speak? So, so when a policy actually pays out and, and, and we have to deal with the, the real life customer and their family and their supports group, we, we surprised about how advisors were either good or not. So good at dealing with that.

Catherine (08:06):
No, because that’s how we are as humans in that sense, you know, people struggle. We, we don’t know what to say, even to the nearest and dearest, when something awful happens, we are so afraid of putting our foots in our mouth that we say nothing. And actually what people told. Awesome. And in my job, 20 odd years, the worst thing you can do is say nothing. You know, sometimes we are a little bit clumsy, but we are far too afraid of that. And actually as, as businesses, we are afraid of our staff being clumsy and, and upsetting people. We don’t want that quite rightly. Um, so no, I’m not surprised that people struggle with it. Because I think everybody, they struggles with it, you know, even bereavement counsel sometimes don’t know what to say. Because we get faced with situations where you think actually, you know, I put myself in your shoes, what do you say to somebody in those circumstances?

Roy (08:54):
Yeah. So, so, so, so there’s, there’s lots of right things to say, but equally there’s lots of wrong things to say, but the probably thing is that you should say something.

Catherine (09:00):
Yeah. Yeah. And the, the kind of golden rule where the last few years has always been nowhere to say, I know how you feel because each grief is so unique and each person is so unique and the context around that death and that bereavement is, you know, you can’t possibly know how someone feels, but what you can say is I have been in a similar situation when that happened, what helped me was blah, blah, blah. Or actually, I’m just really sorry for that, that this happened to you.

Roy (09:28):
And obviously that goes back to Kathryn’s central point about empathy, because I think the role of the advisor here is, is to show the empathy. And, and I are both strong advocates of the, advisor’s got a very central role to play when there’s a claim. Um, and I think it really frustrates us that certain people in, in our industry, uh, don’t think we have that role. And, and I think we have got responsibility because if we are the people that place the policy, well, ultimately place the policy that if something goes wrong, there’s going to be a claim and we have to be integral to that. You agree with that?

Catherine (09:56):
Yeah. And you’re only as good as the last claims process, really, as far as I can see, you know, at the end of the day, each, each individual who deals with these processes, who deals with the families is uniquely responsible for the relationship with that organization. If it goes wrong, that’s probably the place where it’s going to go wrong because somebody did, didn’t say the right thing or didn’t quite do something that they, they would’ve been expected to do by the customer. And the problem is the, these customers are vulnerable by definition. And sometimes when people believed they spend an awful lot of time telling and retelling the story, um, and that in itself is quite distressing. That it’s difficult. It’s a difficult relationship and it’s very, it’s a sensitive one to manage. And, and actually if you don’t manage it well, it will be to the detriment of your organization.

Kathryn  (10:44):
Absolutely. I was going to say the, um, going back to, sorry, just something you picked me since you not the anonymity there go.

Kathryn  (10:52):
I say, wasn’t, I, I’m not going to say again that side of things. Um, I imagine, so I know we’ve, we’ve chatted this bit before as well about how that can actually be incredibly useful. Uh, obviously I don’t mean to stereotype, but you know, in terms of men, because I, I think, you know, there is that thing that, you know, men don’t tend to sort of reach out. They don’t tend to speak out too much. They need to be the tough person who is, you know, keeping everybody strong and, and things like that. And, um, and this has actually ended up being like a really positive area for doing this via this web chat ways. You’ve got really good statistics about that. I believe haven’t you?

Catherine (11:26):
Yeah. Yeah. In comparison to regular bereavement help lines. I’m not sure it is that men don’t reach out. Men don’t reach out publicly. Um, yeah, but so if they can do it privately in their own space and time without having to notify everybody about it, men find it much easier to reach out. I think that, you know, we are starting to see a move where we recognize that internalizing distress, which is what men do more than women. Again, without trying to stereotype. It’s not always the case, but actually, you know, finding ways to, to make access as easy as possible to make it not a song down. It’s not a big deal. This is a regular part of life. Grief is a regular part of life. You’re a rare person. If you never have a significant bereavement, a very rare person, this is something that’s going to come to us all in that sense.

Catherine (12:14):
But yeah, men, men really do struggle to, to pick up the phone and ask for help, invariably, from a female workforce and other counseling workforce is very, very dominated by women. Um, and actually having men able to speak to somebody and they don’t know that we have a mix of, of male, female counselors on the system. You don’t know who you’re talking to. You are completely anonymous. It’s, it’s confidential. You don’t have to give us any identifying information about yourself at all. And for some reason, or other men do tend to use the service much more than the other kinds of agreements services that we run, where you have to turn up to group report up, to see a clients the face to face or pick up the follow help,

Roy (12:54):
Which as a man is a great thing to hear. I guess one of the problems we’ve got is as an industry and we are trying to write this, but, uh, we’re still dominated by men as advisors. Uh, there are far too many men advisors and, and not enough female advisors now we’re starting to change that balance. But I mean, it certainly was one in 10 up until very recently. Uh, I mean the protection world, I think we’ve seen figures come, Kevin, we one, we’re getting towards one in three, but you know, there’s a problem in, in, in there as well. Isn’t it? Because if we are going to be a central part of that claims process, uh, you know, the fact that so many advisors are men actually could be, could be an issue dealing with, with, with, with some of those, uh, empathetic moments that are needed. Absolutely.

Catherine (13:32):
And you can look at things like, um, you, of other health services from men, not EAP services and, and kind of anywhere that men have got to kind of find it in themselves to pick up the phone as I’m struggling. Um, the statistics on, on usage are really, really low. Whereas our statistics on Grief Chat, we can’t prove it because clearly a lot of our chats are completely anonymous, but we do ask, you know, we, we obviously moderate and we, we manage the chapters they come through and we do a lot of measurements around who is this chat by and who is it for? And what is it about? Um, and, and that tells us that we think probably near to 40% of our chat as a male compared to maybe 20 to 25% of male, um, contacts through helpline. So it, it is significantly higher. I’d like to be able to sort analyze a debt to more than we, we currently come. Um, because I think it’s a really important way. And I think actually that’s by other services, like shout, um, that is a text based service for anybody experiences sort of mental distress. Um, yeah. And, and there were one or two other you probably heard of, um, calm the campaign against living miserably originally set up to prevent male suicide. Um, and, and they have phoned their anonymized services, work miles better for men than anything else that they’ve offered.

Roy (14:51):
Yeah. I think people often caught shock to hear that the actually the, uh, the biggest propensity for suicide is, uh, is men 45 to 55 and not, not of certain other age groups that people might expect. So if that’s the case, you know, uh, speaking as someone who’s writing that, uh, that, that, that, uh, particular parameter is something we need to talk about. I mean, do you think that paradox COVID helped in a way, because we’ve, we’ve learned to get rid of this taboo subject that we can’t be talking about these, and, and we’ve learned that to your earlier point. I mean, there can’t be any of our listeners that hasn’t been touched by this in some reason. So suddenly, you know, it’s okay to talk about this stuff in public.

Catherine (15:28):
I think it’s helped in, honestly, in that sense, it’s, it’s a problem in as much as, you know, if you work in, in my line of work, we are expecting long term impacts into people’s mental health. There’s a lot of talk about, you know, pandemic or grief or a pandemic of mental health issues as a result of the fall from the pandemic. Um, but yeah, it did help in terms of, we had to find new ways of doing things, help services, like Grief Chat enormously, because all of the face to face group, local community stuff ended very, very abruptly indeed. And people needed to find a different way of getting support. Um, and we were kind of there sort of loitering in the background and, and saying that, so we are business as usual we can contact to us. So yeah, it helped us. And I think it helped with conversation around grief and loss of mental health.

Catherine (16:14):
I think what we have seen though is, is that no, one’s not been touched by grief in some way or lost in some way. We all lost confidence in the world. We all lost certainty that that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday. You know, when, when your access to your usual routines, your access to sort of support and what you normally do to decompress after a day at work, whether that is go to the gym or meet a social club, go playing balls, go to the pub, whatever it is that you do, where all that just stops. Actually, you kind of question, you know, there’s an awful lot of loss attached to that. And, and I think I’m not sure about you, but certainly I, by about 12 months in, I was thinking, is this, it is this, this is where, where we are going to be forever. We’ve lost all of this, um, you know, all of our connections and where we’re having to find new way to doing things. Um, so yeah, I think it’s, it’s, it has changed the conversation and it’s definitely changed the way that people seek and access support.

Roy (17:09):
I mean, I can only back that up with, you know, the sort of friendship groups that I hang around with. I’ve never heard so many men talk about mental health in their lives. Okay. Very openly. And, and, and in the strangers of situation, if we’re going to watch a football game or, or playing bowls or, or, or, or whatever. And I think that’s, you know, there’s, there’s some really powerful changes that have occurred. I mean, there, there is a point here that a lot, a lot of our listeners will have, you know, insurance policies that have EAP systems within, um, and mental health systems within them. I mean, what do, do you rate those? How, how important are they in terms of the, uh, you know, that, that engagement, or is it, is it actually better that the, a few of us that are going to a football game are talking about this.

Catherine (17:49):
It doesn’t matter as long as you do something in that sense. Yeah. I do wear, E’s very highly. I’m the secretary of E P UK. So in that sense, I’m kind of obliged to you because we provide EP services in my other business, but you know, what you see how line the up I’m impressed, but no E service provide a really helpful and useful short term solution for a lot of people. Um, the one thing I would say being a more of a grief specialist than an EEP specialist in some ways is that grief counseling is different because what we are not trying to do is change the way that people respond or how they think about their loss. What we’re actually doing is giving people time, space to figure out what’s happened to them, who they are now, what’s next. Um, and what’s changed in that.

Catherine (18:35):
You know, we’re not trying to change people’s behaviors and outlook, which is very different. So actually, I think EAPs are very well placed to support people with short term mental health issues. Most are not geared up at the moment to deal with serious mental illness, not serious mental health problems. And we have a problem in the system because actually the health service isn’t particularly what I get up either the minute. Um, but there is a part to play. Um, but it for grief, in some ways I would say CCO, somebody who is especially trained or has education knowledge around grief and MOS, because it’s a little bit different. C BT is never going to work for grief and whatever it’s just not,

Kathryn (19:15):
I was going to say, um, and just again, because things we’ve talked about before, and I suppose, you know, we’re saying, you know, and saying there’s probably nobody really, who’s not been touched by grief or bereavement in the last couple of years and at least some point in your life, you know, people will experience these things. And I think we could talk about maybe like the scale of the need here. I know you had the phenomenal amounts of conversations with people last year, didn’t you?

Catherine (19:38):
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we, we went really from a tiny staff doing a proof of concept in 2017. And then in 2018, we took less than not fewer than a thousand chats. We didn’t have as many partners and we can’t just play around with it on the website. And then of course we get into gearing up a little bit. Then the pandemic hit and we, we completed, I think about 49 and a half thousand, nearly 50,000 chats in 2021. Um, and that’s kind of continuing to grow slower now than it was doing. Um, but that’s, we, our attacks are really, um, they’re not driven. It’s reef chat has got the chat bot on, on the website, but we are driven by our partners if you like. So it’s more about partner sending group, their reef customers tools. So actually, our partnerships reflect very directly on, on the numbers of chats that we get.

Catherine (20:27):
Um, but we are finding more people, particularly we’ve had most people on through a first anniversary if someone, especially if someone’s died during the pandemic. And there was a very particular set of circumstances that everybody who had agreement, whether it was couldn’t be with somebody at the end of life or couldn’t have a proper funeral or a funeral that we would’ve wanted, um, or couldn’t meet up with friends and family to commemorate the life of that person. You know, we’ve, we’ve gone through most of the first-year anniversaries now. Um, and actually people are realizing that this is it’s, it wasn’t a bad dream. And actually, this is, this is a new way of living and, and we are without this person. And sometimes I think we’ve, we’ve found a Grief Chat that people are still really struggling to, um, accommodate. I can’t say accept because there’s a lot of people who never accept Ross. Um, but accommodate the fact of this, this person died in this really rare and unique set circumstances.

Roy (21:21):
Perfect. I’m not, I’m not sure if you’re aware of a situation that the PDs recently got involved in, but, um, we, it came, it, it came into pass as they say that there were several insurance companies out there who, for some ridiculous reason thought that they shouldn’t come and tell the advisor when a claim came in. Um, and, uh, we got quite frustrated and actually angry about this because we, you know, we felt that we had a role healer as well now. Yeah, they may be the odd, odd person that doesn’t want their advisor knowing. Um, but you know, we, our view is that that’s few and far between, so the, the PDG called on a charter, which basically said that every time a claim comes in, you, you are pretty much obliged to go and tell the original advisor who sold the policy that a claim’s been made. What are you, what are your thoughts on that?

Catherine (22:04):
I would you imagine that those are advisors are well placed to give people access to the service is that they need, um, so it seems strange to me that you wouldn’t involve that person as being kind of a linchpin, I suppose, to all of the connections between the policies that families have taken out and the support that’s available and, and how best to get the more out of your plans. Um, yeah, it would seem really important to me that those people are involved.

Roy (22:26):
Great to hear that, because I think it’s, it’s just, it’s not just advisors saying this it’s people on all sorts sides of the fence. And, and actually when you talk to real life customers, this is let’s face what we do this job four, they all agree with that. So we just found it a bit strange and, uh, a quick, a quick mini shout out to any insurers that are listen that are still not doing that. Please start doing it because, uh, it’s actually something that, uh, uh, we feel very, very strongly.

Kathryn (22:51):
Absolutely. I think you have to sort of think of it as well, that with a lot of people using an advisor, um, a lot of them aren’t insurance savvy. Um, so just like they would maybe use an accountant because they’re not tax savvy or pension savvy, or use a full financial advisor for the investments and everything like that. They’ve come to that. You, because you are their specialist, you know, similar with a lawyer, you know, if they’re wanting to go to someone for, uh, wills or trust of some sort, um, they’re not going to just go suddenly to someone else, you know, sorry to some higher company of some sort that’s ranging something they’re going to go to the person that they trust because they, they don’t want to speak to a big corporate. They want the, and they’ve got to know that relationship that’s there. And almost if you, if there’s a barrier to allowing that the advisor to help them, you are kind of putting a barrier in their ability to actually take even more time to, like you said, to accommodate in a sense, the grief or the bereavement, because instead of being able to focus their energy on that, they’re having to navigate a whole system without that trusted, you know, in a sense, almost like a trusted friend that’s beside them.

Kathryn (23:59):
So I know obviously when we’re talking about like the insurance world as well, and we’re talking like specifically, we talk about protect insurance and things like life insurance, um, critical illness covering and protection, things like that. I think for the bereavement side of things, it, it can be quite clear where you, you, you and your team in a sense we’ve possibly step in Catherine. You know, so like we’re talking about with the life insurance somebody’s passed away, so their loved ones are reaching out. There’s been a mix. And, um, and, and yeah, you, that’s, that’s very clear there’s, there’s no gray there. It’s kind of black and white. You’ve lost somebody unfortunately passed away. You’re going to step in. And then we’ve got the other side of things. So with the grief, and I think it’d be quite good to start, maybe even explore a little bit the terms of grief and what that kind of means in terms of reaching out to you guys, because I kind of see griefers a number of different things.

Kathryn (24:50):
So I kind of feel like could grief be classed as someone who has long COVID and is grieving for the life that they no longer have, or someone who’s been diagnosed with a very significant condition, like Parkinson concerns or cancer, and they’re facing a very emotional, um, and, and quite traumatic change of circumstances. And just even thinking then what we were saying then about COVID, you know, and people, you know, you said about being able to cope with, um, not cope, you know, as best as possible cope with a bereavement. Um, but just generally that’s that loss of our usual existence, in a sense, it’s kind of like, where does, where does the grief boundaries kind of come in? When, when, when do people have grief that’s appropriate to come to a grief counselor and what doesn’t fall within that kind of bubble.

Catherine (25:38):
If you ask me every type of grief falls under the remit, which is why we’re not called bereavement care or bereavement chat or whatever, because, you know, when I, after I started 20 years ago, I think it was like 2002, um, in bereavement, people didn’t even know what bereavement was. No, it wasn’t a word that was in create common usage. Um, so we there’s been an awful lot of work. So it’s kind of improve awareness of what grief and loss, what bereavement is specifically bereavement by depth. There are lots of different types of bereavements, you know, you can lose your health, you can lose your, um, economic funding in the world, or, you know, your security, or there are all kinds of losses that are appropriate to speak to somebody about the grief connected that loss. And we do speak to people, um, on the service about coming to an end of life situations or people who them cells have got a long term condition or a life limiting condition.

Catherine (26:31):
Um, and, and actually what that means, you know, the number one fear who did the research, but the number one fear of people who are dying is the people who that they’re leaving behind. Most people, they may be concerned of course, about their own end of life, but actually most people’s fears relate to other people that they care about. Um, and, and actually that’s really important that people are able to, to talk freely, um, UN plan properly for the end of their lives. You know, that that’s, um, a really important step for a lot of people.

Roy (27:02):
I think that goes full circle to our earlier point about advice still being involved, because presumably one of the questions you get asked in the anxiety side of this is, is how we’re going to survive from a money point of view. Yeah. And, and, and again, Kathryn, and I would both argue that’s exactly why we should be involved at claim stage because we’ve got a role to play sometimes. Um, you know, and someone might taken a policy out for a certain reason, but, you know, there’s, there’s a, there’s an often quote a statistic that, uh, a lot of critical illness policies that were taken out to pay mortgages off, don’t pay mortgages off in totality. And I think that’s a positive thing because what that means is that the advisors getting involved and look at the, the entire picture, uh, and sometimes paying debt off, isn’t actually the right thing to do. So, um, presumably you’d agree that there’s another role advisors there in terms of the, uh, you know, the, the, the financial side. And then of course the, the often quote statistic that one in three mental illnesses starts off with financial pressures. Um, so you’re presumably seeing this all the time.

Catherine (27:56):
Yeah, absolutely. And, and, you know, despite the, uh, the us’ best efforts to add mental of grief as a mental illness, since the DSM is like, I’d be really resistant to the idea that that grief is an illness as such, but it can definitely because illness. You know, if, if you are struggling along with your mental health or a particular issue that related to grief or loss or bereavement for long enough, um, it can make you ill in terms of your physical, um, capabilities and, and your mental health as well. So, yeah, I think our advisors actually probably have a broader role than I’d ever considered in that sense, in terms of providing that practical information, making sure that people have the right product and services and understand what are in the things that they’ve already purchased and, and how, how that can benefit them, but also kind of walking with people through the maze of, of getting stuff done after bereavement and that support that goes with it.

Roy (28:48):
I’ll give you another anecdote, which hopefully you’ll, you’ll agree with, um, many of our listeners will be involved in a group market and sometimes the argument gets having group deaf in services. Oh, we’ve got a very young demographic now, as all three of us know people die of all sorts of ages. And one of the things we’ve done recently with, uh, an unfortunate death is the, we arranged by the insurance company to have grief counseling for the entire population in a particular company, because the person that died was 25 years old. Okay. And what the HR, um, director said to me, you know, almost from day one, is it really affected the younger people in the company rather than the older people, because suddenly, you know, they, there was someone that they knew that they were going out with who died, who was 25 and, and that had massive gratifications. And I hopefully you agree that that’s a great example of where your profession can come in alongside the insurance company and really help with, with, with, with talking to people.

Catherine (29:37):
Absolutely. Yeah. And to go back to your point about the pandemic as well, actually, the, the, the rising grief anxiety or death anxiety has been astronomical. And that, that absolutely covers young people as well, because they have seen people like me go through this and actually not survive or end up with long COVID and their life prospects and, and what the future looks like is completely unrecognizable. You know, at one point we’re saying during the pandemic, this is, this is something that tends to affect people with comorbidities. Our older people are more vulnerable people, and actually the reality bar that, that lots of young people are affected as well. And that can be really shocking when you are a young person and you think you’re indestructible as we all did when we’re young. Um, and that’s, if somebody dies and, and, and that really resonates, I think for a lot of young people and they, it, it kind of the, the reality that this could happen to me, um, I think can, can be a real shock for people.

Kathryn (30:34):
I think that kind of feeds in as well, such like going back to my advisor heads. And so I just, just hearing all of this is then how people feel about potentially even trying to access insurance again, going forward, because, you know, there are a number of people that we’ve spoken to. Who’ve said, oh, I had depression because of bereavements, I know that’s going to affect things. And, and things like that. And as an advisor, you, you kind of start going, it’s not necessarily going to affect things. Don’t, you know, please don’t worry, you know, it’s, it’s all very reactive to timings and, you know, sort of how strong somebody’s symptoms were and the types of products that we’re looking at. Um, but that in itself, you know, not only people are worried about their health, but then, like we saying about the financial side of things, you know, people, some younger people are starting to get much more in tune with the fact of, you know, they need to be more in touch with like pensions and maybe put some insurances in place to look after income and, and things like that.

Kathryn (31:26):
And actually then they then may be looking at these questions and thinking, well, hang on a minute. I do I say yes. Do I say no? And then that starts to build into something else. And it kind of possibly prolongs what they’ve, they’ve been feeling previously, because they’re kind of, I’m going to have to go through this again, and then it’s automatically bringing back up a time that isn’t great for the him. And, um, it just seemed to feel as if it kind of is, is reaching out into so, so many different areas and, and probably areas that from the start, a lot of us wouldn’t even think about you probably think grief. I think a lot of people would probably say grief and bereavement. All right. Okay. Somebody’s passed away. And that would be probably an initial, like knee jerk reaction. If someone said to you, oh, just tell me a really short summary, but it’s huge. There’s, there’s so, so many aspects of it. But, um, do you want to, because we’re coming towards the, the end of the, of the podcast. Do you want to tell us a bit more about Grief Chat then Kathryn, and stuff like, just really just explain who you are, where abouts the opposition to how people can get in touch.

Catherine (32:19):
Sure. Yeah, the easiest way of getting in touch is to go to www.griefchat.co.uk, we’re on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and all those places you would expect to find those I’ll great chat. Um, and essentially, it’s the simplest. It’s one of those things that when you build something that’s incredibly simple solution and go, why do we not do this years ago? And it, it literally takes 10 minutes also to install brief chats, a little bit of HTML code. You put it into your website or a customer environment, or wherever you think people should access it. And up pops a little chat box. And behind that is one of our professional vetted CPD accredited, uh, counselors who are essentially can just then chat back and forth with a person about whatever is bothering them at the time. Um, give them support, give them advice and information if that’s appropriate, um, and just be with them in the moment essentially.

Catherine (33:11):
So we tend to, oh, I’ve always chat them the minutes about 24 minutes, give or take. Um, but you, we tend to chat about an hour. People can come back as often as they need to. So it can act as, as a gateway into longer term counseling for the people who need it. It acts as an immediate service for the people who need that. It acts as a safety net for people who are worried act, we get a lot of very early breed people who say, I know how I’m going to deal with this because it’s too early in the process to really know what’s happening. And it acts as a well, do you know what this is? How grief looks and feels. This is what to expect. This is when you need to, to think about getting extra support, if further down the line, you’re still really struggling. Um, so it does a lot of different things in the mob simple way.

Kathryn (33:58):
Yeah, that sounds absolutely brilliant. Thank you. And thank you so much for coming on and sharing, uh, the information about Grief Chat and just how important it is. And, uh, and I hope to see even more areas where such like websites in our kind of field, where I, sorry, go on. And I can see you sort popping around in there and knowing that people have, uh, have taken this as, as seriously as it does need to be taken. I

Roy (34:18):
Also think that this is a great example, that collaborative approach that the industry’s now taking, you know, how can we not be talking to the likes of Catherine? And to certain extent, probably vice versa, because at the end of the day, we’re dealing with the same customer. Who’s got the same situation that we’ve come in, started different directions is, you know, makes no world. I think this is great that, you know, this is, uh, something that our listeners should. And, I, you know, I had a good look at the website. I encourage everyone to go on, have a look. It’s, it’s fantastic.

Catherine (34:42):
Thank you very much.

Kathryn (34:43):
Well, thank you everybody for listening and thank you for all of your insights, Catherine. It’s been really, really helpful. Um, next time I’m going to be back with, uh, and, uh, we’re going to be going through some more special client risks and talking about how they mix with insurance. If you’d like a mind of the next episode, please drop me a message on social media or visit the website, www.practical-protection.co.uk. And don’t forget that if you’ve listened to this as part of your work, you can claim a CPD certificate on the website, too. Thanks to our sponsors, the Octo Members. Thank you both very much.

Catherine (35:15):
Thank you.

Roy (35:16):
Thank you.