“You've just gotta think positively and you’ll be okay!”

Like most who’ve faced a serious life challenge, that’s what I heard from one cheerleading friend when I had cancer.

“Oh yeah? You try thinking positively when you have cancer,” I wanted to say. Instead, I held my tongue, fearful of hurting or alienating her. It’s not that I didn’t want to think positively. Who wouldn’t want to convince herself that if she just got her mind right, the cancerous growth inside her would shrivel up and disappear for good? But, for many, forcing an upbeat attitude is not easy—or even advisable, according to Barbara Ehrenreich.

In her new book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, the best-selling author and columnist takes aim at the "happy face" movement she claims has millions of Americans “drinking the Kool-Aid” of positive thinking, sometimes to their detriment.

“If you're sick and believe that your recovery depends on your attitude, then you feel this terrible pressure, like ‘How can I be positive when I’m so miserable?'” says Ehrenreich, who speaks from experience. After being diagnosed with breast cancer almost 10 years ago, she got a hefty dose of the “pink ribbon culture’s” exhortation to "just think positively," which, she writes in Bright-Sided, attempts to “transform breast cancer into a rite of passage; not an injustice or a tragedy to rail against, but a normal marker in the life cycle, like menopause or grandmotherhood.”

In 2001, shortly after she completed treatment, she published an indictment in a national magazine of the “cult of pink kitsch,” in which she said what sustained her through treatment was the “purifying rage, a resolve, framed in the sleepless nights of chemotherapy, to see the last polluter, along with, say, the last smug health insurance operative, strangled with the last pink ribbon.”

Ehrenreich's cancer is in remission (though she points out, “there’s no way to rule out the persistence of cancer cells in your body”). But the skepticism she'd felt about the benefits of staying positive when she was sick resurfaced while she was researching a book about white-collar layoffs. She realized those who’d been downsized got the same line as people with cancer. “I began to see how ubiquitous it is in our culture, this [idea that] `you have to think positively to get through it’ because nobody wants to be around anyone negative,” she says.

In her book, she disputes the widespread notion that positive thinking improves health outcomes, citing several studies, including one published in the December 1, 2007 issue of the medical journal Cancer, which looked at data on nearly 1,100 patients with head and neck cancer and found that their emotional state had no effect on their survival. Ehrenreich argues that telling patients they have to look on the positive side can actually have a negative impact on their emotional health and, perhaps, keep them from taking other steps to deal with their condition. It can make them feel their pain is being minimized or altogether ignored; or, worse, that they’re to blame if their condition worsens.

“What I wanted from people [when I had cancer] was that they continue to treat me like myself," Ehrenreich says. "I wanted to have conversations about other subjects. I didn’t want this, ‘How are you?’ ‘No, how are you really?’ kind of stuff. I really wanted to still be a member of the living.”

Most who face any difficult life challenge—whether it's a life-threatening disease or a job loss—need more than anything to know that, whether they're feeling optimistic or not, their friends and loved ones will be there for them, says Ehrenreich. That support can have a more powerful effect, she says, than simply being told to stay optimistic.

She hopes that Bright-Sided gets people to stop focusing on just being positive and to start taking action to deal with their situation and do what they can to improve it. “There are certain things, like dying of cancer, that sometimes you have to accept, but over and over I see people who’ve been laid off in the recession saying, ‘I’m trying to think positively, but I can’t find a job, there’s nothing out there,’" she says. "I want to tell them: It’s not whether you’re positive or not. Can we see that clearly and begin to get together to make some changes?”