The ‘Lived Experience’ Folly

The idea of “lived experience” exerts wide sway across many areas of social policymaking today, from homelessness to mental illness to addiction. Those crises have deepened in recent years, even as lived experience’s influence has continued to grow.

Task forces, nonprofit boards, conferences, and congressional committee hearings frequently reserve slots for people in recovery, formerly incarcerated or homeless individuals, and “consumer survivors” of psychiatric care. Federal agencies request that grant applicants include people with lived experience in decision-making. Even the Department of Justice solicits people with lived experience for service as grant application reviewers. “Nothing about us without us” is the rallying cry of the disability rights movement.