Lived Experience as Clinical Veto

In contested areas like gender medicine and antidepressants, personal narratives are used as a rhetorical shield to shut down scrutiny and sustain treatments with weak evidence. This dynamic can misclassify harms (e.g., antidepressant withdrawal as 'relapse') and block better guidelines (e.g., ultra‑slow tapers). — If anecdotes can trump data in medicine, governance must reassert evidence‑first standards to prevent policy and clinical practice from being captured by emotive narratives.