The evidence is clear: when injured claimants start to avoid driving, social situations, or physical activity in the days following a motor-vehicle accident (MVA), those patterns can calcify rapidly. And that increases treatment duration, legal involvement, and claims costs.
But the claims industry rarely asks one logical question: who has the best chance of interrupting avoidance before it takes hold?
Answer: It’s not the psychotherapist; it’s the insurance adjuster.
Adjusters are usually the first people claimants talk to after an MVA. That conversation happens within 72 hours of the event, which is precisely the window when a person’s nervous system is most flexible – threat appraisals are still forming, and behavioural patterns aren’t yet set.
Normally, psychologists and therapists don’t enter the picture until weeks or months later, if at all. By then, the window has largely closed.
But the adjuster is there when it matters most.
Importance of early contact
Research shows early social contact after a traumatic event isn’t just a nice to have. It’s one of the strongest predictors of whether a person’s distress will resolve or compound.
A meta-analysis of 68 studies finds post-trauma social support is one of the strongest predictors of whether psychological distress will, or won’t, become entrenched. Warm, normalizing responses from trusted figures immediately after a traumatic event are associated with reduced symptom severity and faster functional recovery. And cold, transactional, or bureaucratic interactions can heighten threat perception and reinforce a sense of helplessness – both of which are predictors of prolonged psychological distress.
Adjusters are not, and shouldn’t try to be, therapists. But their interactions with claimants are not psychologically neutral. Every word choice, every tone, every framing of what happens next either reduces or amplifies the claimant’s distress – and the insurance industry has largely failed to measure the cost implications.
Behavioural signals
When a claimant describes pain, fear about returning to driving, or worry about the future, the adjuster’s response can send a signal about what is normal, what is expected, and what will happen next.
Responses that acknowledge the emotional dimension, even briefly, tell the claimant their experience is expected and manageable. But responses that immediately get into documentation requirements unintentionally tell claimants their emotional experiences are outside the scope of what this process addresses.
The signals adjusters send matter.
Early avoidance stems from how a claimant reads their situation. Do they feel supported and that their situation is manageable? Or do they feel uncertain and threatened?
Research consistently shows people who receive early, normalizing contact after traumatic events are significantly more likely to maintain function, and less likely to avoid returning to their normal, daily tasks.
Related: Recovery | Why avoidance, not trauma severity, can delay motor vehicle accident recovery
Adjusters’ early access to claimants gives them a direct and largely unexplored influence over each of those variables. A one-minute, well-scripted normalizing statement from an adjuster, delivered early and authentically, can meaningfully shift outcomes.
While most adjusters want to help claimants they speak with, they often lack the right script.
This can prompt a default to the claims process’ transactional language, because adjusters’ training teaches them to ask about injuries, document facts, explain next steps, and move on.
This is a training gap.
Fortunately, the required skills are not complex. Adjusters don’t need to become counsellors. They need three things: language that normalizes the emotional response to a collision without dramatizing it, a brief and credible explanation of what early support looks like, and a clear referral pathway when the conversation warrants it. These things are learnable, measurable, and scalable.
Improving claims outcomes
From a claims management perspective, the case for investing in adjuster scripting around early psychological contact is straightforward.
Claims involving unaddressed psychological distress take longer to resolve and are more frequently litigated and expensive. Research measuring actual health and economic costs in MVA insurance claimants find those with untreated post-traumatic stress disorder incur significantly higher total costs than claimants without psychological morbidity.
The cost of not training adjusters in this area manifests in prolonged treatment authorizations that are rarely traced back to their origins.
The insurance industry makes significant investments in physical rehabilitation pathways but has been far slower in investing in the psychological options. But psychological recovery unfolds on its own timeline, and is shaped by the interactions claimants have in the hours and days after impact. Adjusters’ work happens during those early hours after an MVA, but they’re often not equipped to be fully effective.
Repositioning the adjuster’s role does not require an overhaul of claims operations. It requires targeted scripting, brief training, and a clearly defined referral structure for early emotional support. The infrastructure already exists in many organizations, but what’s often missing is the clinical framing to help adjusters understand why what they say during that first call is doing psychological work – whether they know it or not.
Kristin Graham is a Registered Psychotherapist and president of Graham Guidance Inc., which delivers structured early emotional recovery support within auto insurance claims environments.