Bright-Sided

Excerpt

...Rather than providing emotional sustenance, the sugarcoating of cancer can exact a dreadful cost. First, it requires the denial of understandable feelings of anger and fear, all of which must be buried under a cosmetic layer of cheer. This is a great convenience for health workers and even friends of the afflicted, who might prefer fake cheer to complaining, but it is not so easy on the afflicted. Two researchers on benefit finding report that the breast cancer patients they have worked with "have mentioned repeatedly that they view even well- intentioned efforts to encourage benefit-finding as insensitive and inept. They are almost always interpreted as an unwelcome attempt to minimize the unique burdens and challenges that need to be overcome." One 2004 study even found, in complete contradiction to the tenets of positive thinking, that women who perceive more benefits from their cancer "tend to face a poorer quality of life- including worse mental functioning- compared with women who do not perceive benefits from their diagnoses."

...Whether repressed feelings are themselves harmful, as many psychologists claim, I'm not so sure, but without question there is a problem when positive thinking "fails" and the cancer spreads or eludes treatment. Then the patient can only blame herself: she is not being positive enough; possibly it was her negative attitude that brought on the disease in the first place. At this point, the exhortation to think positively is "an additional burden to an already devastated patient," as oncology nurse Cynthia Rittenberg has written. Jimmie Holland, a psychiatrist at Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center in New York, writes that cancer patients experience a kind of victim blaming:

It began to be clear to me about ten years ago that society was placing another undue and inappropriate burden on patients that seemed to come out of the popular beliefs about the mind- body connection. I would find patients coming in with stories of being told by well-meaning friends, "I've read all about this- if you got cancer, you must have wanted it. . . ." Even more distressing was the person who said, "I know I have to be positive all the time and that is the only way to cope with cancer- but it's so hard to do. I know that if I get sad, or scared or upset, I am making my tumor grow faster and I will have shortened my life."

Clearly, the failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.

Copyrights (c) 2009 by Barbara Ehrenreich.  Reprinted by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.  All rights reserved.