To HATE the phrase "lived experience"?

[ThisFluentBiscuit]

Pet peeve incoming:

By definition, experience is lived! You can hardly have an experience without living it, fgs! And what's the opposite of lived experience? An experience that you've had, yet haven't lived? It's complete nonsense. It's used to sound falsely clever when an argument is weak, like "In my personal experience." Well, of course your experience is personal! You would hardly say, "In my neighbour's experience, I find Florida too cold in December."

And it's officially wrong, because it's a tautology. Like "top-floor penthouse."

I don't know whether it's the innate stupidity of the phrase or the fact that it's a linguistic fad that annoys me the most.

"stamps off"

Have a look on the NMC website and come back to me, OP. Yes, midwives certainly also care for women when they are unwell, even though pregnancy and birth aren’t illnesses, and yes I would care for a woman with an episiotomy. But it’s not called nursing because I’m not a nurse. And with absolutely no criticism of nurses intended, it’s quite offensive to refuse to see the distinction between the two. I’m also not a physiotherapist when I give advice about pelvic floor exercises, or a doctor when I prescribe medicines as a midwife.

On the topic of social care as a whole, Britain has so many social problems that we should be making it easier for people to train as social workers. A fast-track two-year vocational course, post-A Level, that's earn-while-you-learn. And better pay.

Oh the old "It's offensive." I bet most laypeople think that midwives are a type of specialist nurse. Really, save your offence for actual offences, like racism.

I mean, if you cared for my episiotomy, I would consider myself to have been nursed by you. There's overlap, surely?

@ThisFluentBiscuit
I have no idea if cunt has been consistently in use since its inception.

How on earth would you claim to know the frequent its usage throughout the centuries?

I just Googled NMC and a bunch of American stuff came up even though I'm on a British laptop - am in the US right now. Interestingly, the American equivalent of the NMC is the American College of Nurse-Midwives, hyphen theirs. Seems like there's a lot of overlap in the US.

midwife.org/

Studied the entire canon of English lit 800AD to 1950 in a bachelors and master's in English. That's nearly 1,200 years of literature. Obviously I didn't read every single thing published in 1,200 years, but I had a good bash at it. Never came across it once. I also didn't hear it that much it in common usage until the last 30 years. It was rarely heard in the first 20 years of my life. I think I can safely say that it crept into common usage in the last 30 years, and it seems to have really expanded in the last 20 or so.

The offensive bit is completely discounting someone else’s perspective even when they’ve expressed it to you, and continuing to insist that you’re right even though you know less than the person you’re speaking to. Which has some overlap with racism, no?

No, because you chose to cosplay offence before I'd even had a chance to look up the thing you directed me to, which I wanted to look at in order to see the difference between nursing and midwifery.

This American stuff all came up though. NMC is the Nursing and Midwifery College? I'll try to plug that in. I got some naval thing when I tried NMC.

Argh, so frustrating. The Nursing and Midwifery College search brings up nursing and midwifery schools. Can you please let me know the full name of the professional association?

It's council, not college. Found it!

OK, it looks like a non-lay-person website. So I just Googled the difference between nurses and midwives and it says that nurses provide healthcare across a wide variety of medicine whereas midwives provide healthcare for labour and delivery. Which is what I assumed.

OK, I understand that a midwife is not a nurse. But is it correct to say that midwives aren't nurses but they do some nursing? Like caring for a patient's episiotomy?

OP you are persistent in looking for new knowledge, I’ll give you that!
You won’t like this answer - but because of professional history and legislation, I wouldn’t describe any of a midwife’s activities as nursing. They might be nursing a wound if they care for a woman’s episiotomy. But midwives deal with the whole person and holistic care is important, so they would say, and would want you to say that they are caring for the woman’s episiotomy. Or just that they are giving midwifery care. Yes the activity of caring for a wound is something nurses do. And midwives now actually do a lot of ‘nursing’ type activity because the population generally is less fit and more high risk than we were - so a lot more pregnant women develop gestational diabetes etc or complications that nurses might deal with. But we’re still not nursing them, we’re giving midwifery care. The same way an obstetrician is not midwifing if they go and talk to a woman about their birth, which is a midwifery-type activity. The professional identity isn’t altered by different activity.

I’ll be at work all day so others might be glad to know, no more about midwifery from me!

Because when people act because 'it's obvious what's needed here' and 'just apply some common sense' and 'get on with it without thinking about theory' (all things I have heard trainee social workers say)... there is a problem.

Aside from a small number of specific situations where what needs to be done is pretty obvious - reach out and grab that person to stop them jumping out of the window to their death etc - how to help people effectively is a really difficult question. How to balance risk management with respect for people's autonomy is a difficult question.

Social workers have power over other people's lives. When theory is mocked and ignored, what tends to prevail is instinct / 'common sense' / that status quo. This is a place where biased judgements, unchecked assumptions and oppression flourish. Sure, theory and research doesn't tell social workers how to resolve practical problems but ideally it gives them different ways of thinking to draw upon when there's a risk of their own perspective becoming blinkered and reminders of what research has uncovered about similar situations.

I think likewise when it comes to the debate about language, an appreciation of power might be the point you are missing. Others here have alluded to the idea that in mental health settings, the experience of those living with the challenges has tended to be dismissed in favour of valuing the experience of the psychiatrist and other professionals with experience of how to treat it. This is despite the fact that great mental health treatments actually still do not exist for many types of challenge and that the experts in this field really are unable to help many people. Of course 'experience' can mean many things and it is pretty easy to rectify confusion by adding a few more words of explanation, but the term 'lived experience' is designed to counter that false assumption that professional experience is the default or the assumed type of valuable experience. The phrase is an attempt to wrestle with issues of power and status by trying to grab some back for the people actually in need. The words of people with psychosis, for example, were once dismissed by an eminent researcher as 'empty speech acts'. The voices of patients did not matter at all.

It would be lovely if there were a less clunky and irritating way than 'lived experience' to achieve this of course, and yes, you are right when you joke about 'dead experience' - I think that experience of working with people with an illness rather than experience of living with that illness is implicitly being denigrated as pretty worthless (which I do think is unfair, despite the limitations of what existing treatments can offer).

@greywarden this is absolutely excellent. I have been thinking about this overnight and this is the best post on the subject.

And OP, @ThisFluentBiscuit , you need to read that post and try and understand it. Having done the Cambridge English MA (which is what your degree sounds like, or something of that nature) you aren't as comprehensively well educated about politics and language, and the politics of language, as you think you are.

Your naive assumptions about the word "cunt" are laughable and a literal example of the gaps in your LIVED EXPERIENCE and how you have generalised those assumptions to be truths about the world. Cunt wasn't used much except in the last 20 years????! Give over. "It was rarely heard in the first 20 years of my life" 😂 My young children don't hear it much either!!

You were a child then an undergraduate reading the formal canon of literature, which had a lot of cunts in for the early modern part, then about a zillion jokes punning on the word for a few hundred years, plus things like Fanny Hill and Marquis de Sade and other well known sex texts that, you know, contain the word. Then politeness from the 17th/18th century on, and modern literature then gradually becoming more open to explicitly breaking taboos. And yes adults now being more ok with saying it in polite company.

But the word has always been there. So obviously you just haven't heard it around you much when you were young and with a certain group of people from a certain background reading a certain set of books. Now you have access to wider content plus different social groups.

Shows the danger of generalising about the world when you mean... your own experience.

Which is why stringent theoretical assessment of the socially constructed nature of concepts like help, common sense, experience... is vital in our scholarship, in our professional work, in our lives.

Basically the advice I'd give you is have a bit of bloody humility and stop assuming you know everything.

Editing, preparing a text by eliminating grammatical errors (e.g. tautologies), repetition and time line/character inconsistencies, surely.
'lived experience' is a tautology and is also a trope used to beat anyone with who doesn't agree with various currently fashionable causes e.g. CRT, BLM etc.
Anyone can talk about anything they know about - you don't have to have 'lived' the experience, with enough information we can imagine it, that is literally 'picture' (which seems to be a soley human trait along with projection of ideas into the future) and we also have empathy. And because we can understand things we have not experienced is why anecdotal evidence is not accepted in court or in the legislature - t'aint reliable as it is subjective.

Just because 'lived experience' is used badly by some people, either misused, or used to trump everyone else's opinion, doesn't mean it isn't a useful term. It just means people need to stop misusing it.

You might be able to 'imagine what an experience is like', or put yourself in someone's shoes. But this isn't the same as having ongoing experience of living in a situation, with a condition, experiencing the barriers it creates. If you are imagining being in a situation, or trting to empathise with it, you can stop imagining it. If you are living in the situation, you can't escape it. You don't have the depth of the experience or the nuances. You can't see the full picture.

I don't understand what you mean by anecdotal evidence not being accepted in court as evidence - surely every witness talking about their experience (rather than expert evidence) is providing subjective, anecdotal evidence?

You are conflating having ‘experience’ with having ‘an experience’ (or experiences). They are different.

Your irritation is based in grammar.
You can’t have an unlived experience. BUT you can have unlived experience.

Omg OP! You are seriously on a mission to wind up the whole of mumsnet. Trying to explain to a midwife what is and isn’t her role…seriously. If you’re like this in real life how do you not walk around with permanent black eyes?!

I think what she means is hearsay is not admissible in court. As in you can’t report someone else’s experience. You can of course give an anecdote based on your own experience. Again, OP proving she is…not the sharpest knife in the box…

@GretchenWienersHair do you mean that those white women are saying they have lived experience of racism when they are referring To having witnessed someone being victims of racism? So really they have experience but it isn't lived experience per se. If of course they are talking about racism they have experienced first-hand then of course they have lived experience of racism.

Anyone can talk about anything they know about - you don't have to have 'lived' the experience, with enough information we can imagine it, that is literally 'picture' (which seems to be a soley human trait along with projection of ideas into the future) and we also have empathy.

While that’s true to an extent, your theoretical knowledge will only take you so far. Hearing from people who have lived experience of racism, disability etc will show up gaps in service provision, or point out where your thinking has missed a bit in how life actually is for someone. Of course hearing from one person gives you that individual’s experience which will be different to another person in the same situation, so we need to be ever listening an open to the idea that even with all the knowledge in the world we might still get it wrong.

Knowing where someone is drawing their knowledge from - theory, from supporting others or from their own experience of living with X helps us to balance needs and provide effective supports.

Anecdotal evidence is evidence that relies solely on subjective experience. I might be confusing it with hearsay - sorry. Perhaps I was thinking of someone saying they truly believed an intruder was going to kill them and so shot at them - this is a belief and there would need to be objective evidence that it was a reasonable belief (that the man on the Clapham omnibus would believe) so the burglar would need to be carrying a weapon, be heard by someone else to shout 'I'll kill you' etc, or that someone else in the house is very vulnerable and won't be able to defend themselves - I think the pensioner who killed a burglar with a screwdriver was acquitted on those grounds, his disabled wife was upstairs - though also intent to kill must not be there?
As to the rest, generally I agree that living in a slum is different from having a look and imagining it - of course it is. But because I don't live in a slum it doesn't mean I cannot empathise and also it doesn't mean I/we cannot work out how to alleviate the condition.
Misuse of 'lived experience' is a bugbear because 'my experience' covers it - though, again, my experience is subjective.

There doesn’t need to be external evidence to support the reasonableness of the belief ie you don’t need evidence from someone else that the burglar shouted “I’ll kill you”. The testimony of the defendant homeowner, if considered reliable, is enough. It irks me, as a fellow pedant, when people say “there’s no evidence” about eg a rape charge - the victim’s testimony is itself evidence.

I do think your pedantry is misjudged in this case. People say “lived experience” to encourage their audience to realise that the thing - eg racism - has really happened to the person in question. It might seem tautological but it’s emphasis.

Imagination and commonsense only go so far. I once read a heartwrenching account of an Aboriginal woman who, as a child, saw her mother trip and fall painfully on a shopping trip to the city; the white women walking past ignored the crying child and injured woman completely. That is not my “lived experience” because I am white, and it would never have occurred to me that any woman would be so cruel, but it was certainly her “lived experience”.

This is just your ignorance and lack of understanding talking. You’re angry because you don’t truly understand.

Let’s sideline racism for a second and use a different example.

If I say I have lived experience of sexual assault, it means it has physically happened to me. My friend could say she has experience of it. She was in the room when it happened, she stood as witness in court and had been supporting me through the aftermath. Her experience was not lived, because the definition there means “was the one it happened to.”

It is, like many things, a term or turn of phrase and trying to say “logically we are all living our experience” is redundant and ignorant. The specific definition exists for a purpose. Someone with lived experience has a different position and intimate understanding than someone who has, yes, experience of, but not have it personally happen to them in their lifetime. Hence, lived. It doesn’t mean “was breathing when the incident occurred near them” FGS. So stupid.