‘Iedereen is ervaringsdeskundige in het leed dat leven heet’

The expression ‘Iedereen is ervaringsdeskundige in het leed dat leven heet’ is Emma’s claim that experience of suffering is not the exclusive property of psychiatric patients or formally designated experiential experts. In conversation with Gwen, she challenges a hierarchy that treats some people as uniquely qualified to understand distress while discounting the emotional knowledge of patients, relatives, and people considered normal. Her argument does not make everyone’s circumstances identical: it distinguishes shared human feeling from diagnosis, and asks that both kinds of knowledge be taken seriously.

The conversation with Gwen

Emma develops the expression while walking with Gwen after Gwen explains that she thought an experiential expert might help Emma put her second admission into perspective. Emma objects not simply to recovery as an idea, but to the way the word experiential expert is used. Its literal definition, she argues, is someone who has experienced something. That description cannot belong only to a professional category or to people with a particular diagnosis.

She tests the limits of the claim through examples. If Pieter hears voices, Emma asks, does that make him better able to understand Asperger syndrome? And why should someone who received day treatment for anorexia necessarily understand a person admitted for manic depression better than a nurse does? Gwen replies that she has never been depressed. Emma’s answer is not that experience of depression is irrelevant, but that the absence of that particular illness does not make Gwen incapable of understanding every feeling associated with it.

The expression gathers force as Emma names those feelings: sadness remains sadness, and frustration remains frustration, whether someone cries because of another admission or because a child is ill. No two people have lived precisely the same experience, she says, but feelings can still be shared. She argues that patients might gain more from the experiences of people around them in everyday practice than from one weekly hour with Pieter. The point is not to dismiss specialized support, but to resist treating one designated person as the sole bridge between patients and understanding.

Suffering beyond the patient category

Emma supports her case with people whose pain does not depend on psychiatric admission. Dokter Visser has lost her husband; Karel permanently cares for his son after an accident; Emma’s mother had three miscarriages before giving birth to Emma. Her mother, Emma stresses, has never been admitted, experienced depression, taken psychiatric medication, or seen a psychiatrist. Those facts do not establish that her mother has undergone the same illness as Emma. They establish that absence of a psychiatric history does not mean absence of profound grief or an ability to empathize with emotional suffering.

The companion assertion that psychiatric patients do not have exclusive rights to psychological pain sharpens this distinction. Emma is pushing back against a boundary drawn around who may speak, recognize distress, or offer understanding. Her examples make that boundary difficult to defend: bereavement, caring for an injured child, and repeated pregnancy loss are specific forms of suffering, not interchangeable diagnoses. Shared feeling makes connection possible without turning different histories into the same story.

Recognition is not diagnosis

Emma extends the argument from empathy to the timing of diagnosis. Rajid has told her that an average of four years passes before someone with bipolar disorder receives a diagnosis. During that interval, she argues, a person may already know what the illness feels like. She recalls that in the ten years before her first admission she was already manic, hallucinating, suicidal, and depressed, despite not yet having the patient status that would later identify her experiences as psychiatric.

That example challenges the division between normal people who supposedly cannot understand patients and patients whose experience becomes legible only after diagnosis. Emma describes a contradiction in the language around experiential expertise: normal people are said not to exist because they are all potential psychiatric patients, yet those same people are also said to be unable to understand psychiatric patients. Her complaint is that diagnostic labels cannot plausibly serve both as proof that ordinary people are patients in waiting and as a barrier that makes their capacity for recognition suspect.

The distinction matters because Emma’s own account preserves the difference between common emotional ground and psychiatric symptoms. She has described hallucinations as altered perception and delusions as beliefs that feel profoundly true even when she knows, at another level, that they are not. During a suicidal crisis, she felt an all-encompassing certainty that death was necessary, and her other feelings were absorbed by that idea. These experiences are not reduced to ordinary sadness by her expression. Rather, their specificity sits alongside the possibility that other people can recognize grief, fear, or frustration without having had the same symptoms.

Empathy in practice

Elsewhere, Emma’s encounter with Beatrice gives the argument an intimate counterpoint. Beatrice says she no longer feels God’s presence, which she had experienced throughout her life, even during depression. She explains that after beginning medication during her first week at the PAAZ, that feeling disappeared; she went home hoping that stopping the medication would bring it back, and later returned. When Beatrice asks whether Emma knows that feeling, Emma answers that she does not. She can nevertheless recognize how comforting the experience must have been and how cruel its loss feels to Beatrice.

Emma offers a tentative possibility rather than claiming authority over Beatrice’s experience: perhaps depression, rather than the medication, has drained the energy needed to believe, as it can drain the energy to laugh, feel happy, or love someone. Her response does not require identical belief or history. It proceeds through attention to Beatrice’s account and an attempt to imagine its emotional consequence. In this scene, understanding is neither a credential nor a claim that one person knows exactly what another feels.

The expression also sits beside Emma’s insistence that understanding does not cancel responsibility or personal agency. When she recognizes how Rajid sees her as a patient who may need protection from herself, she understands the weight of his concern but still says that he must let her go: this is her life, and she has to live it herself. The claim that suffering is widely shareable therefore does not make care unnecessary or risk unreal. It resists reducing a person to the patient role while leaving room for others to witness, help, and remain distinct from the experience they seek to understand.