"lived experience"

That clarifies it a lot for me, thank you! :)

How about someone's lived experience as an abused spouse

I'm a trustee of a charity. Until recently, the board and our staff were all white British. Our charity supports people who are mostly brown and have gone through something that none of us have. Our experience of it is only from the outside.

So we have spent the last few years advertising vacancies on the board and on our staff, encouraging people with lived experience of this, to apply. So people who have been through what our service users have. Have properly experienced it and who understand exactly what our service users are going through. And probably identify with their culture too.

I'm not sure what language would have been in place of it until recently, but I think lived experience is clearly putting across something very different from 'experience'. And it worked for us and we have some fantastic more recent hires who fit the bill.

Still think it's wanky on MN though! I keep reading stuff like "I have lived experience of a child waking lots in the night". I mean fucks sake we've all got that

I didn't until DC4 so until that point I had experience of infant sleep patterns because I'd had three infants of my own and I could empathise with parents of poor sleepers but I had no lived/direct experience of that situation so while I could offer advice or support I didn't know exactly what it was like. When DC4 came along I gained that lived experience.

It may be something that a person has experience of daily, I have just heard ot in context to insulin dependant diabetes.

I am presuming lived experience must be a knowledge of a topic which a person is aware of in graphic detail.

You can experience something by witnessing it. Your lived experience is specific to things you have actually been through.

A doctor treating a broken arm has no lived experience of a broken arm. A childless midwife has no lived experience of giving birth. A criminal defence lawyer has no lived experience of being on trial for murder. A witness of a car crash has no lived experience of a car crash. A funeral director has no lived experience of losing a child.

Lived experience is a first-hand experience of actually going through the topic at hand. Not viewing it from the outside.

Experience of the care system: has worked with care leavers or looked after children, has completed academic studies on the subject, has written policies/procedures in relation to the care system, has been involved with the funding, maintenance or administration of care placements.

Lived experience of the care system: grew up in a foster home.

That was my loved experience to a doctor on rotation in that department

I got asked about my " case history" when in the epu unit about my multiple miscarriages. One time the student doctor was looking up a text from his mate. Told him to fuck off twat. Before I was ok to talk. But I kept getting asked ....

Yes @JarByTheDoor - I think you are right, it’s a subset of “personal experience”.

I think the term 'lived experience' is sometimes used by people to support or add weight to their individual interpretation of events in a similar way to when they 'speak their truth', sort of like, 'I've lived it, so the way I see things must be correct'.

In my field it's an important phrase which acknowledges that while someone can be academically an 'expert' in something, e.g. a medical condition, a person who lives with that condition has a different knowledge of it, which needs to be valued.

I have lived experience of bipolar disorder, which is a subset of personal experience. My DP has personal experience of bipolar disorder (mine) but not lived experience, as he doesn't have it himself, and certainly not professional experience. So while we both have personal experience, only I have the lived experience. My doctor may not have either lived experience or personal experience with bipolar disorder (or they may happen to), but they will have professional experience.

It's not my favourite phrase, but it has a purpose when it comes to distinguishing types of experience in this kind of context, where traditionally professional experience was privileged to the exclusion of all other kinds of experience.

I work alongside lived experience practitioners (peer support) - its very common in maternity and mental health services. I think it's just a development building from coproduction and recognising the value of a variety of voices and perspectives.

There’s a difference. I’ve worked in criminal justice so I have long experience of prisons. But I’ve never been a prisoner- those who were have lived experience. It’s an important classification for policy makers in particular to listen to those who know a subject from the inside, not just the official or political perspective. There are lots of examples of wanky jargon usually involving ‘journey’ or ‘care’ (as a suffix) but lived experience isn’t one of them imo.

OP - can you see there might be a difference between having experience of something because you’ve worked with people who’ve been through XYZ or have a family member who’s had XYZ or you’ve witnessed XYZ - and the person who’s got/been through XYZ.

it’s a way of explaining if your “experience of XYZ” is something you just know about 2nd hand or 1st hand via “living” with it/through it.

Just because you’ve never been in a situation where it’s been useful to differentiate between people who know about something VS those who’ve been through it, doesn’t mean it’s not useful to others to have a quick and easy way to state the difference.

That's a good explanation if the difference

I definitely agree with a PP though that “on a journey” is wanky as all hell, unless you are referring to actually physically travelling somewhere. And even then probably only by steamship.

Well, that's semantics really.

But in fields like medicine, lived experience is recognised as the patient's experience, whereas the doctor could have plenty of personal experience also (and much of it very important and useful) but there will be aspects they don't really 'get' as they simply don't have to deal with it.

And I think that's ok BTW. Plenty of doctors maintain a sort of detachment from the illness they specialise in to maintain their own mental health and it helps them do a superb job. But they can't ever truly understand what it is like to live with eg. chronic illness every day, and know that is it for the rest of their life (unless they also have it) and that's where lived experience is another important perspective.

For me working in mental health I would define it as

Experience - I have had experience of working alongside patients who tell me what withdrawal from drugs feel like and how it impacts them.

Lived experience - Ive experienced and felt every physical and mental symptom from withdrawal/going cold turkey.

This is why Peer Support Workers with lived experience are absolutely essential to the work we do and support we offer and having a lived experience is definitely not a wanky buzzword IMHO

It’s bandied around in Social Care a lot e.g a Child Protection Chair will ask the Social Worker what the child’s lived experience is through direct work. Makes sense in that context and it’s a bit of a shorthand.

It’s used less in the context of things like a broken arm and more in terms of chronic and complex conditions and in particular mental illness. Conditions where one medical diagnosis may affect each individual in a very particular and different way so that their own depiction of their experiences and decisions, as well as the knowledge gained from these experiences and choices, is a very particular personal experience. It’s intended to put the individual rather than the illness at the centre of their care.

It was old hat as a phrase when I first began working in and around mental health services back in 2006, so whilst it may now have become a buzzword for other things, it isn’t new.

There's a difference between knowing about homelessness because you worked in a shelter or because you lived on the streets. Lived experience is the latter.