Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich Read Free Book Online Page B

will end up giving her a more fulfilling life? Unable to actually help cure the disease, psychologists looked for ways to increase such positive feelings about cancer, which they termed “benefit finding.” 20 Scales of benefit finding have been devised and dozens of articles published on the therapeutic interventions that help produce it. If you can’t count on recovering, you should at least come to see your cancer as a positive experience, and this notion has beenextended to other forms of cancer too. For example, prostate cancer researcher Stephen Strum has written: “You may not believe this, but prostate cancer is an opportunity. . . . [It] is a path, a model, a paradigm, of how you can interact to help yourself, and another. By doing so, you evolve to a much higher level of humanity.” 21

    But rather than providing emotional sustenance, the sugar-coating 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.” 22 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.” 23

    Besides, it takes effort to maintain the upbeat demeanor expected by others—effort that can no longer be justified as a contribution to long-term survival. Consider the woman who wrote to Deepak Chopra that her breast cancer had spread to the bones and lungs:

    Even though I follow the treatments, have come a long way in unburdening myself of toxic feelings, have forgiven everyone, changed my lifestyle to includemeditation, prayer, proper diet, exercise, and supplements, the cancer keeps coming back.

    Am I missing a lesson here that it keeps reoccurring? I am positive I am going to beat it, yet it does get harder with each diagnosis to keep a positive attitude.

    She was working as hard as she could—meditating, praying, forgiving—but apparently not hard enough. Chopra’s response: “As far as I can tell, you are doing all the right things to recover. You just have to continue doing them until the cancer is gone for good. I know it is discouraging to make great progress only to have it come back again, but sometimes cancer is simply very pernicious and requires the utmost diligence and persistence to eventually overcome it.” 24

    But others in the cancer care business have begun to speak out against what one has called “the tyranny of positive thinking.” When a 2004 study found no survival benefits for optimism among lung cancer patients, its lead author, Penelope Schofield, wrote: “We should question whether it is valuable to encourage optimism if it results in the patient concealing his or her distress in the misguided belief that this will afford survival benefits. . . . If a patient feels generally pessimistic . . . it is important to acknowledge these feelings as valid and acceptable.” 25

    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