Have you lived a "lived experience"?

Even Medieval Leprosy Sufferers can have them, apparently

During my Woke Waste series there have been a few expressions that keep cropping up when I do deep dives into taxpayer-funded nonsense.

Saying that, you don’t necessarily have to have been nosing around to seen/heard the term I will be delving into today - “the lived experience”.

Have you got “lived experience” of “the lived experience”?

What even is “the lived experience”?

When I hear people say “the lived experience”, it sounds a bit like when someone uses “literally” in a sentence. I do it myself, and I know it’s naughty - adding literally nothing to what I am saying and basically being a way to add a bit of drama to the message.

Likewise, no one needs to add the qualify the word “experience” with “lived”, because every experience is lived - unless you think dead people can go on rollercoasters and trips around the world, and need an alternative to the normal “I have a pulse” type of experience.

To get pedantic, the Cambridge definition of experience is “(the process of getting) knowledge or skill from doing, seeing, or feeling things” - which you obviously have to be alive for.

Silly me

But what do I know? If you Google “the lived experience”, you soon find it a far more complex area than meets the eye.

The mental health charity Mind has a whole guide to help us (the “unliving”?) understand what a “lived experience” might look like:

At Mind, we involve people with lived experience in our work. This helps us make sure our work is as helpful as possible to the people we support.

We call this lived experience work. But there are lots of different words used to describe this work. And it can be hard to know what they all mean.

So we've created this glossary of terms, together with people with lived experience.

…

We want everyone with lived experience to feel empowered. Rather than put off by complicated words and phrases.

As this glossary was written by people with lived experience, descriptions or phrasing haven't been changed. For example, where Mind would usually use the term ‘mental health problems’, here we have kept the phrases 'mental distress, illness, or diagnosis' to reflect the words people have used.

Right…

If that wasn’t clear, here is some more information about “the lived experience”:

It sounds a bit like, I dunno, an “experience”?

Then there’s this useful explainer on “Indirect lived experience”:

According to Mind there are always ways you can build your knowledge of people with “lived experience” (as opposed to you, the unliving):

Mind even has titles for “people who do lived experience work”.

Since I first discovered the phrase “the lived experience”, I started to notice it EVERYWHERE. Take this example… on a government blog! It’s written by Policy Lab - whose “mission is to radically improve policy making through design, innovation and people-centred approaches” (whatever that means).

Policy Lab says of its Lived experience in policymaking guide:

This is our fourth blog based on our project for the pioneering Changing Futures programme in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC).

No idea what the Department for Levelling Up is doing there (one for another day) but here’s the guide:

Policy Lab explains:

Lived experience refers to knowledge acquired through direct, first-hand and personal experience. In policymaking this usually refers to people with personal experience who interact with a policy in their daily lives

There’s also a “shortlist of some key practices for carrying out lived experience”. One bit of advice is:

Consider commissioning a professional lived experience group, who are established, well supported and who can work with people to make sure they are practically and psychologically cared for before, during and after the work.

Confusingly, another of its tips just refers to “experience”. But is this the same as the “lived experience”?

Consider what else you can give back and what people can get out of the experience, for example exposure to policymaking, being in an office environment, or public speaking at workshops and meetings.

When it doubt, I often think the best thing is to turn to Reddit (seriously). Someone a year ago can be found asking what I am now:

The answers are much easier to understand than Mind and Policy Lab’s definitions.

Eventually there’s some scrutiny:

I’ve got to admit I’m on Litizen’s side (below), as well as the Cambridge dictionary’s.

But clearly this phrase isn’t going away. So we better be prepared.

Here are some examples so you can understand why your experience may or may not be “lived”:

The lived experience of female participants

The lived experience of sex workers

Diverse range of lived experiences (also for sex workers)

Lived experience of homelessness

Lived experience newsletter

Lived Experience of Medieval Leprosy Sufferers

Lived Experience Team (LET)

Non-Binary in Higher Education: Lived Experiences Imagined Futures

The more discerning of you may have noticed my inclusion of the University of Cambridge study into “the Lived Experience of Medieval Leprosy Sufferers” - which might indicate that dead people are included in the “lived experience”.

But the researcher carefully points out that Medieval Leprosy Sufferers’ lived experiences will be “reconstructed” - making them, I think, less dead (for the purpose of the study). The researcher adds that historical descriptions of leprosy sufferers were “quite generalised and overly negative". Hopefully they can all cheer up now they’ve been “reconstructed” to have a “lived experience”.

So there you go. I imagine you might feel be feeling very “educated” after reading this article - but please remember that only people who say things like “the lived experience” can be “educators”.

Next time I’ll be delving into more academic definitions and areas, such as “more-than-human approaches” and “zine making”.