Lived experience

[Thinkingaloud85]

Just say experience.
Grrr

Agree with you both whole-heartedly. You've explained it far better than I have.

You have experience of working with mental illness

The patients have experience of having mental illness

You could, but we already have the term 'lived experience'. Some of the experience referred to is that of being in the system, not just the illness itself. Using the term is a way of validating those voices with an underlying theoretical or academic discipline (that of phenomenology).

So basically it’s a synonym for personal experience. But agree, I don’t like it personally. It’s akin to your true self and all that bollocks, bringing your whole self to work

Lots of the terms used to describe people and their experiences are passive, medicalised or have become stigmatised over time. ‘Lived experience’ is currently the most acceptable and least stigmatised term.

‘People who have experience of living with mental ill health, of the mental health care system and all of the challenges, barriers and stigma that come with that’ is a mouthful when you can say ‘people with lived experience’

You can just say people with personal experience of

Not really because you can have personal experience of things without having lived experience. I have personal experience of disability because my mother used a wheelchair. I don’t have lived experience of it.

In that case you would say as a disabled person. There’s no need to say lived experience because it’s obvious if that’s your status.

Anyhow it’s a question of style. I wouldn’t personally use that expression but you would, and that’s fine.

I must be missing something here because that's exactly what I'd understand the description ' people who have had significant mental illness ' to mean. I suppose there may be people with undiagnosed or untreated mental illness but surely they're unlikely to be working with someone to improve mental health services?

OK everyone! Shush!!! I'm going to save you ALL the time you would have spent labouriously formulating your views on this...

Just read the thread from March this year.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5286126-to-hate-the-phrase-lived-experience?page=1

A cracker of a thread, featuring the OP getting more and more dumb, intransigent and annoying, and some brilliant interventions from other posters on linguistics, the changing face of sociology and social policymaking. By the end of the thread you will have an appreciation of how shifts in power in the real world show up in our language.

Please don't bother writing something boring about how it annoys you or it's a tautology meh meh meh bleat bleat bleat, until you have read this whole thread. I am the self appointed mumsnet police, and I have spoken.

YANBU won (just!) 🤣

It did, but everyone who voted she was NBU was an ill-informed dick, unfortunately.

Which is almost as bad as a well-informed dick.

I think it needs a reboot. Times have changed since March

I hate it. Everytime I hear it, I want to ask "when were you dead?".

In the often dismal world of DEI it is absolutely used to shut people down - if you don’t have the correct experience of X, Y or Z you need to keep your mouth shut.

I think it’s useful. And can be used to try to shut people down, if only specific lived experiences are seen as valid in a situation.

I am a trans-racial adoptive parent. In some places the adoptive parent doesn't have a valid lived experience, we are oppressors and the privileged voices are those of adopters and birth parents. In other places my experience - in which i defer to my daughter, who has an open and healthy understanding of her history - is seen as valuable to other adoptive parents who are trying to support their children to have a healthy sense of their identity. I don't claim to have answers, but I can say what seems to have worked for us. Which is our lived experience.

You've really nailed a point that hasn't been covered before, there is nuance in everything and it's not always about perceived hierarchy - but understanding and appreciating the whole gamut of lived experiences... including deference, integrity and asking honest questions rather than relying on assumptions.

I'm really glad you posted. Your approach sounds brilliant by the way. Hats off.

Thanks for linking the previous thread!
Delighted to have found an interestingly contentious phrase to be pedantic about!

Although, I am now fascinated about the strength of feeling aroused by this turn of phrase. There seem to be some political undercurrents here that I wasn’t expecting.
After all, we all have experiences (lived or otherwise), it’s not as though certain groups of people have the monopoly on ‘lived experience’ while others don’t.

I agree. I am in my late 70s. A younger person may know some old people, but I have lived experience of ageing. Of living through the fastest changes in society, before most homes even had TVs, before the first space travel, before supermarkets.

No, it isn't!

Of course everyone has lived experience of something. I understand that it sounds like tautology if not aware of the social and political context.

It’s used effectively in quite specific contexts. If you use or work in support services it is a way of defining those people who use the service and live with whatever it is that leads them to need to use the service. ‘Service user’ has become stigmatised as has ‘client’. Those are passive labels.

Also, people are human and tend to go to the shortest way of saying something. This is also the way terms become stigmatised labels which may well happen to this term further down the line and something else will start to be used. But currently if I say I have both professional and lived experience within mental health services, people are going to understand exactly what that means without me having to go into great detail about it.

It's in the A level geography syllabus I teach in a unit about place. How people might have a lived experience of a place or maybe a rose tinted outsider perspective etc. I think it can be a very useful term but maybe overused day to day.