To HATE the phrase "lived experience"?

Love you! In a nutshell!

I hate the way its used.

Its used as a Top Trumps. As if its the highest form of evidence that one can never question as 'its my lived experience.'

There was a person on here asking for views on a alternative therapy, and when people gave her the actual evidence base on the (no more than placebo) effectiveness of this treatment, she dismissed this as 'she wanted lived experiences as lived experience is just as valid.'

No its not. For nearly all of human history all we had in terms of medicine was ' 'lived experience' and that led to people suffering horribly and dying. The scientific model of investigation transformed medicine.

Sorry, no. Experience what each have of different things. And 'lived experience' is subjective, anecdotal, it cannot be the basis of decisions or legislation, which need to be based on actual, real facts, not anecdotes about what happened to me.

Incorrect.

When a health professional is said to have experience in something, the implication is that it's professional.

At last I’ve found my person! I hate it too. I also find it utterly patronising.

I refuse to use it and say ‘direct experience’ instead. If you’ve supported someone through something personally or professionally (e.g. a loved one through cancer treatment), you have some experience of what it’s like but not direct experience.

I also hate the term ‘multiple and complex needs’. We all have multiple and complex needs FFS.

It's a weird turn of phrase in 'real life'. I work as a mental health nurse and my colleagues are experienced in mental health, but they may not have lived experience. You also specifically involve people with lived experience in research projects to make sure it's appropriate. It's used very clearly to contrast your position as a professional Vs position as a patient. Hear I think it has a clear linguistic difference.

I have lived experience of being gay, people who aren't gay can have experiences of homophobia by witnessing it, but they can't live it.

Really though, who cares??? This is such a non issue...

This is exactly why 'lived experience' is not just annoying and a tautology but also a put down.
I see 'lived experience' being used as an argument against anything the speaker does not like e.g. that some ethnic and social groups do not do as well as others in educational and career outcomes. It is also the current 'race card' - used to shut down any suggestion that there is not extreme endemic and systematic racism in the UK.

I’ve only heard it used to emphasise experience of something traumatic or difficult.

I’ve never heard someone say ‘I have lived experience of using spreadsheets’ but might say ‘lived experience of racism and xenophobia’ to highlight it’s something they’ve been through.

It’s also not quantifiable - ‘experience using spreadsheets’ requires more digging to understand depth and breadth of knowledge. No one is going to want details of the racism (I hope).

Every field and organisation develops its own variations of language. Often it's to add nuance or a particular meaning, even if it is tautologous. Sometimes, words or phrases escape into the wider world, and meanings shift and adapt, because that is how language works. One of the wonderful things about English in particular is that there is never only one way of saying something.

I work in IT. There are very many (mis)uses of language which would bother me before "lived experience".

(In the case of cruises, it's more relevant to know whether someone's experience is as a passenger or crew.)

Great explanation... sorry OP, I have changed my view from reading the posts on here and think there is a place for these terms in assisting clarity of meaning. All of these kinds of experience are important in a different way, and it provides a shorthand way of explaining where each perspective comes from without having to go into detail (which may also be painful/too personal).

This is the hill OP has chosen to die on

I agree OP. 'Lived experience' sounds like a wanky Americanism and I've only heard it used in a jokey way amongst friends.

I prefer 'personal experience'.

It is great that people get paid to take notes on the voices of poor people! Whoop whoop.

You could of course, just give them your jobs. That would do a whole lot more for the people that are in need.

I agree that the term is tautologous and irritating. I think its use is sustained, particularly in mental health, by practical difficulties. New ways of using words (including terms that seem to be empty) tend to arise out of need. This makes it difficult for me to condemn the term completely.

On the mental health worker side, it is awkward to say 'I have experience of working with people experiencing schizophrenia'. It would be more convenient to say 'I have experience of working with schizophrenics / people with schizophrenia' but we don't want to say that because there is a movement in mental health to avoid using language to equate the diagnosis with the person - a very sensible movement in my view because it can be pretty dehumanising and pessimistic to just refer to people by a label, eg 'depressives', 'rape victims'. (An exception is with autism, where there tends to be a movement towards so-called identity-first language as part of a desire to reclaim a medical diagnosis as a positive aspect of identity. Not many people seem to want to do that with depression or schizophrenia, perhaps unsurprisingly.)

On the side of those with 'lived experience', such people might previously have been referred to as patients and sometimes they still are, but again there is a concern about the appropriateness of this, particularly for people not actively accepting or needing medication or who don't agree with a medical model in relation to their experiences. 'Service users' or 'clients' might get used instead but have the disadvantage of defining people through their transactional relationship to the organisation amd of course don't work for people who do not want to 'use' mental health services. Of course people could go around saying that they are someone with 'experience of schizophrenia' but again that relies on them buying into the diagnosis and is also not a way in which a lot of people like to walk around defining themselves, even in a medical context. 'Lived experience' has the benefit of being vague here and non-essentialising.

Ideally there'd be a convenient way of referring to different types of experiences easily but I do think there are real practical barriers.

This is so patronising

No they are not. You can't have 'deaded experience'.

There's a huge difference in the health professions. Professional experience gives a very different perspective to personal experience.

It is differentiated based on the depth. For example, someone working with people in poverty, living with them to do research etc., has experience with poverty. The person living in poverty has lived experience. It is different.

I have been involved in the recruitment for jobs that prefer lived experience. I've worked alongside people for whom lived experience was essential in recruitment.

The term lived experience is used because it's unambiguous. The description you use is confusing - it could be taken to mean professional experience.

I assume in the world of copy writing it doesn't come up very much but in service support becomes into job adverts a lot. Additionally whenever any consultation is taken out or research it is used then. I worked on the poverty truth commission for my local area which brought together about 200 people with lived experience of poverty as well as those working in support services. The whole point of the commission was to hear the voices of people with lived experience.
Your way of saying it is just a bit more convoluted not saying it's wrong it's just a bit long-winded.

Only someone very insecure in their expert status would feel threatened by the input of those with first hand experience. Most would see it as a valuable addition to their own learning, especially if thats been gained by listening to hundreds of others. Why not one more?