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"

That's just called 'experience'.

why doesn't the NHS use the word 'personal'?

It's far more accurate then 'lived'.

I have zero respect for the words the NHS uses, especially as 'women' is being obliterated and we are now all 'people' - so I'd not hold the NHS up as the best example of language. Most of what they produce is ridiculous.

I’ve no idea why.

Has experienced X or Y.

As opposed to

Has worked in X or Y field.

It is really quite simple.

I don't think a job would ask for that, but for the purposes of this discussion, let's say it would. Let's say the role calls for someone who knows what it's like to be depressed. Why can't the ad say that they want people who have experience of being depressed? Saying that they want people who have lived experience of being depressed adds nothing to the sentence without "lived."

Do you genuinely think a researcher has the same insights as somebody that has lived through something? They would most certainly have useful and important information and be able to give perhaps a more balanced view but it will be limited if you just relied on secondhand evidence. Particularly if there are researcher that only looks at works done by other researchers. What reliant on primary evidence that don't include the actual individuals who have gone through the system but just the staff etc

Most of the support sector has come to the realisation that for far too long services have been created without listening to people that use them. I've been in this field for about 30 years and it is slowly improving.

Oh OP, you are one of those annoying people who don’t realise why something is used and therefore assume it’s just other people being stupid.

you’ve had lots of explanations why this is a useful definition in medical /social care settings- on the off chance you are prepared to learn: imagine a medial condition xxx (doesn’t actually matter what it is).

Now in a medical setting, “experience” is used to mean “have treated it before”. (Eg a midwife with lots of experience of twin births is not a woman who’s had several sets of twins herself, but delivered several sets of twins.)

So a doctor who had treated many patients with xxxx condition has experience of it.

The parents of a child with xxxx condition have personal experience of this condition.

The child with xxxx condition has lived experience of xxxxx. The “lived experience” bit is talked about now as in the past, the “lived experience” aspect was ignored/seen as unimportant compared to the experience of treating it by doctors/medical professionals.

The concept that an “expert” might include people who have condition xxxxx is a relatively new one. So “lived experience” to make it clear the different types of experience.

"Personal experience" is just as redundant and wrong and tautological as "lived experience." By definition, experience is lived and personal to you.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

Oh FancyBiscuit, you are one of those annoying people who don't read replies. I have explained many times that the examples you gave are shorthand for treating or working with someone who is experiencing X. The fact that people naturally use this shorthand does not mean that the phrase "lived experience" is correct.

It is inaccurate for a midwife to say that she has lots of experience of twin births unless she has had numerous sets of twins herself. What she means - and we all understand the shorthand without her having to say the whole thing - is that she has LOTS OF EXPERIENCE OF WORKING WITH twin births.

When a midwife says she has lots of experience of twin births, we understand that she means she nurses these mothers and babies - as long as we know she's a midwife. We do not immediately say "Oh, you must have lots of children! How many sets of twins have you had?"

The fact that people use this shorthand does not make "lived experience" accurate or correct English.

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

This is so patronising

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.

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.

No, the medical profession has experience of treating these conditions. The patients have experience of the conditions.

"Personal" in "personal experience" is redundant, and "personal experience" is a tautology.

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'.

This is the hill OP has chosen to die on

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).

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.)

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).

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.