livedexperience

Lived experience is a term used to describe knowledge derived from direct, first-hand involvement with a condition, event, or social circumstance. It encompasses the perceptions, meanings, and insights that individuals acquire through living with illness, disability, trauma, caregiving, migration, or other life experiences. Proponents treat lived experience as a form of expertise that can complement professional training and traditional research methods.

In academia, health care, and public policy, lived experience is increasingly recognized as valuable input for service design, evaluation, and policy development. It often appears in discussions of patient-centered care, recovery-oriented mental health practice, disability rights, and community-based research. Narratives, testimonies, and life histories are commonly used to capture such knowledge, sometimes through participatory, co-produced, or community-engaged approaches.

Advocates argue that integrating lived experience helps ensure relevance, accessibility, and legitimacy of programs and reforms. It can foster empathy, reduce stigma, and highlight aspects of systems that quantitative data overlook. Many organizations label themselves as led by or informed by people with lived experience, including those with conditions such as mental illness, chronic illness, or disability.

Critics caution that lived experience is not automatically generalizable and can be influenced by individual circumstances or selection effects. Ethical considerations include consent, privacy, representation, and avoiding tokenism or sensationalism. To be responsibly used, lived experience should be integrated with rigorous methods, diverse perspectives, and attention to structural contexts such as inequality and access barriers.

Lived experience is often discussed alongside terms like experiential knowledge or personal experience, with the distinction lying in its emphasis on social action, advocacy, and collaborative knowledge production.