Institutions increasingly invite people to contribute their lived experience. Government agencies appoint patients to advisory panels and call on communities for their views on policy. Health New Zealand employs peer support workers and universities seek lived experience in research. These initiatives acknowledge that lived experience matters.

But there is a catch. In many cases, it is still treated as perspective or testimony rather than as a form of expertise.

Research, professional training and technical knowledge continue to sit at the top of institutional hierarchies. Lived experience may be listened to, but it is rarely granted the same level of authority.

This matters because lived experience is not simply a personal story. It is knowledge developed through ongoing learning that emerges from engagement with systems, institutions and the realities of everyday life.

People navigating psychiatric systems develop understandings of coercion, risk and care that clinical training cannot fully capture. Disabled people develop expertise in access, interdependence and institutional workarounds often absent from policy.

People living through poverty, racism, migration systems or violence develop deep practical knowledge of how institutions function, because life depends on it.

This knowledge is not anecdotal. It is formed........

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