Takaful Protection for Mental Health Illness From the Perspective of Maqasid Shariah

Abstract

Mental health illness becomes one of the major illnesses in Malaysia aside from heart disease. It was recently reported that 29.2% of Malaysians are suffering from mental health illness which increases threefold from the previous year. Majority of the Malaysians suffering from mental health illness comes from the lowest income group. This shows that the lowest income group has less opportunity to seek treatment due to the cost. Even though other countries have started to offer mental health insurance such as the United States of America, United Kingdom, Australia and recently Singapore, Malaysia is still way behind in offering coverage for mental health illness. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to study the mental health takaful from the perspective of Maqasid shariah. The results from this study show that mental health takaful is able to meet the requirement of Maqasid shariah and preserve the benefits of, and prevent harm to human wellbeing. Furthermore, this study will provide an insight to the takaful industry for developing new products that could help mental health disorder patients.