To HATE the phrase "lived experience"?

With a virtual reality headset.

Lived experience is not incorrect English, it’s an evolution of English to create a new term to describe a particular subset of experience.

You assume everyone knows that “experience of multiple births” for a midwife means “experience of treating” - but a midwife who has had twins herself has lived and professional experience- and that can be very useful in some circumstances. Just because you’ve never needed it, doesn’t mean a term to differentiate isn’t needed.

sometimes we need different terms to express different situations/concepts, “lived experience” is a very short way of getting across a different concept of experience, which became a term that is now used because it was needed in many situations.

If you don’t think lived experience should matter more than other types of experience, that’s a different argument- refusing to name a concept doesn’t win that battle though.

No, the objections to it come from people like you who think you've been top trumped because you see everything through a power dynamic. You can't stand to be told that someone else's experiences make their opinions more worth listening to, or more valuable for the specific purpose.

Professional and second-hand experience can also be valuable, and they would absolutely "top trump" the opinions of someone with no experience in the field at all. Obviously.

This thread is really eye-opening when it comes to seeing how many people get disproportionately enraged over neologisms, even when they describe simple (and very much not new!) concepts. See also "cancel culture" - people have been being shamed out of public life for centuries when their behaviour is deemed over the line for that era, and yet we're supposed to think cancel culture is a brand new thing?

Im pretty sure Sara Payne would have a greater depth of understanding and knowledge of child abduction and murder having experienced her own child's abduction and murder, rather than an expert.

Do you not get that an individual only ever has their own experience which they experience through their own understanding or misunderstanding, their own biases and background? They know nothing of anyone else’s experience. At best what they offer is personal anecdote and that is no basis for policy making. A researcher would seek to gather the views of many people, including those who might struggle to get their views heard.

Most of the support sector has been taken over by activists pushing the views of a few very vocal political groups. Just look at how many wear rainbow lanyards and misrepresent the law on women’s rights.

See, this is the problem
There is a huge range of professional expertise that goes well beyond what you dismiss as "doing a course". And lived experience us not necessarily "better".

I don't want my Granny to treat my cancer based on her lived experience of having had cancer. I want a professional . think a practitioner has a broader view of the range of presentations, possible trajectories and outcomes of the circumstances of their area of expertise, and this should be respected as well.

Yes we need to include lived experience voices, but at present the primacy of lived experience as an unquestionable source of truth is unhelpful. Someone with lived experience can only present their own experiences, they don't represent everyone with that condition or circumstance.

Example: my lived experience of mounjaro is that it was horrific and caused dreadful exacerbation in anxiety with constant panic attacks. It is reasonable to represent that and it is annoying that many professional dismiss that as the guidelines don't (yet) recognize this side effect. However it isn't reasonable for me to therefore declare that mounjaro should be banned because it causes panic attacks. In most people, it doesn't. I don't represent most people's experiences, but it is my lived experience. It should be acknowledged, but not necessarily become the foundation of policy.

If you have delivered lots of babies you are an experienced midwife, who has experienced lots of births. If you give birth to a baby you have lived experience of childbirth. They are grammatically not the same thing. You are perfectly at liberty to dislike the expression, but you are incorrect to conflate the two.

You think OP that everyone gets the difference in "shorthand" when the midwife says I have experience in twin births. But the need for a special qualifier on "experience" has a sociolinguistic rationale.

It indicates a realisation we have had in the modern world. We now recognise that to deliver (often public) services effectively and ethically we need to promote and elevate the experience of people who have actually personally had the experience themselves, as we design and deliver those services.

The fact is for centuries people have blurred the "experience" line and the expert in delivering twin babies has always been given more voice than the woman birthing those babies.

A qualifier is there to signal positive intent. Lots of language change is there to underline and emphasise a particular meaning within the set of wider meanings of a noun. It's no biggie. Sometimes stuff changes.

Public transport
Mobile phone
Accessible toilet
Online dating

The world is full of adjective-noun combos that signal a certain type of something within a wider noun.

The subtle and rather nice part of this one, is that it allows you to emphasise a person's experience without defining them by it. In this thread alone, we have had the words
victim
autistic person
Schizophrenic person

etc etc

Not everyone who has grown up in care, say, or has autism, always wants to be named and defined as a care leaver or autistic. They are always much more than that.

So a care experienced young person or a person with lived experience of care honours their other assets and attributes, doesnt define them by their experience.

I'm amazed you can't see that.

Is this the five minute argument or the full half hour? I need to know because of which popcorn to buy.

I don't think it's used as top trumps I think it is just trying to ensure that all voices are heard. I work in some service creation and I think it's essential that you have the voices of management, frontline workers, other service providers, the local authority, the community sector, carers and also people who have lived experience of whatever issue it is you're tackling. For a very long time those last two the carers and people have lived experience did not have any input into a service creation. They shouldn't have all the input but they definitely need to have a voice that is listen to and taken into account.

Of course. Lived experience is often used to differentiate from professional experience or academic knowledge. Indirect experience of an issue, if you like.

This is what I was trying to get across, but you did it far more eloquently 🤣

The terms are literally just to differentiate professional vs personal stances in research literature. There is a clear linguistic difference in that setting. Everyone knows what those terms mean in research.

But anyway. What an argumentative thread over such a non-issue.

I'm finding it quite interesting how this feels quite an important differentiation.
I am usually a bit of a pedant when it comes to these sorts of terms. Yesterday I told my teenager to stop using the term ATM machine and we had a discussion about tautology. I would argue that lived experience doesn't meet the parameters of a tautology because it has a different meaning to those working in the field of support services.

Actually, no, it would not suffice. If I need to recruit a counsellor who has lived experience of say, living with HIV, then I need to be abuntantly clear that's what I want. It also needs to be made clear in as few words as possible.

I have witnessed a mental health crisis, in that I have seen a stranger suffer one. I have experience of mental health crises, as I have helped people I am close to navigate them. I don’t have lived experience of mental health crises as I’ve never had one.

How would you distinguish the last two scenarios? Witnessed is different to experienced.

I probably wouldn’t use the phrase lived experience but it means something different to experience, even if there were better words (eg direct experience).

I think a mix is important. Qualitative research is also crucial where patients are involved. There's no point developing something like a new approach to treating self-harm if it offends the people who would receive it. People's subjective experiences of a treatment are important to research studies to make them ethical.

Also, for example, if a patient is starting an antipsychotic, for example, you can show them the evidence based all you want but sometimes, people just want to know other's personal experience of taking a drug!

Using the word 'lived'? Is there a study that shows using the word 'lived' gets more positive engagement than exactly the same phrase just using the word 'experience'?

HRTFT because it’s too early in the morning so apologies if this has already been said.

@ThisFluentBiscuit the term “lived experience” is a qualitative research method/methodological approach to uncovering the contexts, meanings and emotions attached to an individual’s experience of a phenomena. It makes sense in the qualitative research field but it has found its way into everyday life ie outwith the context of its research-related meaning. A bit like the difference between “significant” in everyday life and “significant” in the context of experimental research/statistics - two different meanings and contexts.

You are kinda contradicting yourself in your arguments that it is “just experience” because the term “lived experience” is intended to differentiate between those who have lived through a particular experience the researcher is interested in (for example, DV, adoption, PND or whatever) and those whose “experience” of it is as a witness, health care professional, friend or whatever.

So the reasons you are giving for it being a useless term are the same as your reasons for the term being useful. Your argument is actually a non sequitur.

No it really makes a difference. This is widely recognised.

But that's not what happens - a small group of people with a very skewed experience have a disproportionate influence on decisions on research direction or funding or government policy. I've seen this in government committees and often the civil servants don't have the experience (or bravery) to say that the priorities of the (generally mildly affected) people in their group do not reflect the common problems reported by the more severely affected people I meet in clinic. It's the people who shout loudest who get heard - whilst the ones who can't articulate for themselves get ignored. Professionals with broad experience of seeing a wide range of people may have more representative knowledge than someone with a mild condition. Schizophrenia is a good example- someone with severe treatment resistant schizophrenia is going to struggle to engage. If you see someone talking about their lived experience of schizophrenia it's fairly safe to assume they are at the milder end of the scale otherwise they wouldn't be talking about it in a comprehensible manner!

I voted yabu because lived experience is massively different and better than somebody who has done a course. It makes such a difference.

I'm largely with the OP - it is normally used on recruitment adverts etc as a way of trying to be sensitive when talking about things like racism, abuse, marginalisation, etc. The word 'experience' would absolutely suffice. It is totally clear from the context they are talking about people who experience X, not people who work in the field of X. It's just not necessary. They don't use the word 'professional' in front of all the other kinds of 'experience' they talk about.

The one situation offered here that I do think adds credence to the term is the wartime correspondent thing. Clive Myrie has experienced war because he's been in those war zones enough to warrant being able to say he's experienced it, but he doesn't have 'lived experience' of war. There's a sense where 'lived experience' means 'prolonged exposure throughout your life'.

Mainly, it's annoying because it is often little more than virtue signalling.