Lived experience

[Thinkingaloud85]

Just say experience.
Grrr

If you are talking about a service which serves multiple different groups it’s difficult to say ‘people who live with a,b,c,d and e and people who are affected by x,y &z’ multiple times a day. And as pp have pointed out it isn’t just about ‘having’ something, it is way more nuanced.

This has been interesting. It seems that in some contexts lived experience is a useful technical term, which I didn't appreciate. If I understand correctly there's a difference between in my experience as ... and lived experience. I think what's jarring is the apparent substitution of one for the other for no obvious reason. If that's what someone means, fine. If they're using it to sound good or to shut someone down, irritating.

Lived experience- very personal, think tears, fears, all the emotions. Experience- you have come across it in life but didn't affect you personally. For example a child has a disability. Their teacher has experience of working with that specific need, but it's the child and parents who have the lived experience of the impact of said disability .

Ooh, I thought I was on my own with this one

I hate it.

Disagree with @Thinkingaloud85

In my field (research science) we use the term for people who have first hand experience of an illness.

so for example. We know a specific type of exercise is very helpful for a muscular disease, but patients don’t seem to be engaging with it.

we design an intervention that is directly informed by doctors, physios, and people with lived experience (or patients). This is really valuable and we have oodles of research to show it improves outcomes to include these groups.

this is also in the context of wanting to empower patients and show them that their experience and knowledge is valuable, just as scientists & doctors experience & knowledge is. Research used to be done ‘to’ or ‘for’ patients without their input, and within real and problematic hierarchies of power. Moving towards this kind of language helps shift the balance.

apologies for typos, typed quickly on my phone!

The trouble is that this phrase has stepped out from medical settings where I can see it has value, into other settings.

Take publishing. The idea that an author might be creative, use their imagination even, to write a work of fiction, has become a bit of an anathema in some circles. That if you don’t have lived experience of X, Y or Z, you can’t possibly write about it. It’s “inauthentic”.

This also has the effect of boxing in writers of colour, who get told that they can’t publish Sci fi - they need to stay in their lane of “lived experience” of being black, or Asian, or whatever.

So do I.

Exactly this. It's no different to 'introvert' and no doubt many other words or phrases which started off with a specific technical meaning but have now been appropriated to have a wider meaning. This obscures the original, useful meaning, which I think is a shame because it makes it more difficult to express exactly what you mean in a way that your listener is going to understand. Hopefully at some point in the future some sort of consensus will evolve and we'll all know we're talking about the same thing, but in the meantime it's something we may have to (reluctantly) accept if we think language has to evolve.

My pet bugbear is disinterested/uninterested but that's a whole different story.

All experience is lived ffs.