"lived experience"

[rampagingrobot]

I keep reading the phrase and it's winding me up!

When did "experience" become "lived experience". Does it actually mean anything different or is it just people trying to be wanky? Is there an "unlived" experience?

YANBU it's a wanky way of saying the same thing.
YABU it means something diffferent. (In which case, what??!!)

It makes sense in my field which is mental health. So I could hire a therapist with experience of treating depression / anxiety. But they might also say they have lived experience of dealing with a mental health problem.

It distinguishes it from professional experience.

Eg. I have professional experience with the mental health care system.

Vs

I have loved experience with the mental health care system.

If I was building an advisory group I might recruit for a mix of the two so that consumer perspectives are heard.

It's really not confusing and could have been googled.

Op, you sound like someone who will call people « snowflakes » and cry about everything now being “woke lefties”. A K….

Experience= “I am a BBC journalist. I grew up in Surrey and went to public school & Oxford. I visited Mansfield once and spoke to some poor, uneducated warehouse workers who voted for Brexit and for Boris. This qualifies me to talk about the ‘Red Wall’ on TV”.

Lived experience = “I’m from Mansfield. My dad was a miner, so were his mates until they were all made redundant when Thatcher closed the pit. The town never recovered. I work in a warehouse on minimum wage. I tried asking for a pay rise, but the boss said that if I didn’t want the job, there were 10 Polish immigrants who would replace me. That’s why I voted for Brexit & the Tories ; to stop immigrants taking our jobs”.

In my experience as a disabled person "lived experience" in the Health and Social Care Settings means :

We intend to financially abuse disabled people in exchange for their knowledge whilst packaging it as an amazing system benefiting all involved

The issue with your fantastic post @Iam4eels is that it assumes the OP is posting in good faith and seeking to understand the differences between the words and how/where they might be applicable.

Everyone's now got "mental health", hilarious isn't it OP?

But yes as above, recently I was harassed in the street, I have lived experience of that, my friend who was with me has experienced what that was like for me by virtue of being present

I just read this in a review about a book called ‘Scarcely English: An A to Z of Assaults on Our Language’.

This is used in my place if work, local authority housing/homelessness . Lived experience of homelessness. I think its ok to use in that context.

I remember the controversy with that book "American Dirt" the woman who wrote it got cancelled because she didn't have "lived experience" but she had researched it carefully and it was a work of fiction. It was well written and insightful, it shows lived experience is not always necessary to understand or empathise

Ditto ‘reaching out’ versus ‘asking’.

Isn't it essentially the same thing as "first-hand experience"?

Just as an example - I have no disabilities, but my mother is blind and so throughout my life I have probably been considerably been more interested in, involved with, and impacted by blindness than the average person. SHE has first-hand experience of being blind, I have second-hand experience, a long-term friend of mine who doesn't know my mother well (or at all) but has listened to me talk about blindness a lot has third-hand experience.

My mother has lived experience of blindness, I have lived experience of living with and in some cases caring for a blind person. Someone else can be a medical expert on blindness without having been in either of these situations. I don't think that "lived experience" is the only thing that matters, but it is often a relevant consideration and it's useful to have a way to describe it.

Unfortunately, the cynic in me thinks that "lived experience" has evolved defensively, out of situations where some people might be proactively claiming experiences they do not actually have.