I guess that a lot of the people being so fucking sneery about this don't understand what lived experience is in this context. The Trust that's advertising provides mental health and learning disability services as well as some physical and community stuff — it sounds like an odd collection of things it covers, but guess it would be included in a list of mental health trusts, even if it does do some other stuff.
Yes, it's jargony and doesn't make sense to anyone outside of the mental healthcare provision sector, but it doesn't need to. It's not written for those people. Lived experience has a particular meaning inside this sector (I don't know about learning disability or substance use or other healthcare sectors, my experience is in the mental healthcare area, but I suspect if they use the phrase it means a similar thing) — it's about listening to people with serious mental illness, taking them seriously, seeking out their opinions and experiences, involving them in decisions about the provision of services and in the delivery of those services, paying them for the work they do to share what they've learnt through having a mental illness and being a patient in services, and valuing the participation and contribution of those people.
Although I don't like the euphemistic way it's talked about, it's absolutely vital that this happens in mental health services more than almost anywhere else, because for centuries mentally ill people have been assumed to have nothing of value to share, and to have no place in delivering, guiding, or directing services. Whatever was done to them, whatever happened to them, no role in deciding any of that. Anything they complained about was just because they were mentally ill. Anything they said could just be discounted, whether allegations of abuse, suggestions for service provision, opinions or concerns about their own care, or how they would like to live their lives and what they would like to work towards.
Lived experience support roles pay people who have experienced serious mental illness to support others with serious mental illness. But there's more to the idea of permitting agency for psychiatric patients. My guess is that a lived experience director will be one of a small number of top positions, in the group of people who organise the Trust at a high level, and will be responsible not only for heading up those staff who are in lived experience roles, but for all kinds of things to do with patient groups, advocacy groups, Recovery College stuff, staff who have experienced mental illness but aren't in explicit lived experience roles, creating space to be heard for those patients who tend to be even more unheard than other mentally ill people, liaising between people, whatever it is that directors within services do, but with a remit of keeping this perspective at the forefront of things.
The advert is all written in this wafty euphemistic way, which I don't like, and the language does kind of invite mocking (and I've seen lots of people on Twitter who I previously respected mocking it and linking it to identity politics and DEI stuff), but mocking the existence of the role itself just feels to me like a kick in the teeth to people like me, with decades of serious mental illness and terrible experiences in mental health services behind me. Big organisations need competent high-level executives to function, mental health services need to have someone among those officers who is responsible for making sure mentally ill people don't continue to be abused and their agency disregarded by services, and in order to get someone competent, you need to pay a vaguely competitive salary.