Customer Reviews

The Right to Feel Bad

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Remarkable in its sanity, the book normalizes a common human feeling, depression. The author takes funny potshots at popular writers of psycho-babble, and is immensely readable. As well, BOY, can she write! It's a beauty to read simply for her use of language, much less the relief at what she has to say.

Lesley Hazleton writes some very thought provoking ideas about feeling bad -- some seemed insightful but with others I had my doubts. She goes into how the unrealistic standards of happiness our culture sets for us affect us. When we feel bad as we inevitably do sometimes we feel even worse because we feel there is something wrong with us. Oftentimes people won't let themselves feel bad and have this desperate frantic desire to get away from their bad feelings. She then talks about how feeling bad can be necessary to a healthy life because we need time to mourn lost relationships and ideals. She describes it better than I can.

I have trouble, however, with her ideas that depressed people have a better view of reality than others. She writes that depressed people are more in touch with the harsh realities of life. She dismisses the cognitive psychologists who talk of cognitive distortions common in depression. My own experience leads me to think that depressed people evaluate their chances of achieving goals and being happy more pessimistically than objectively. They are not looking at harsh reality but reality through very negative lenses. Sometimes happy people seem like that they avoid and negative thoughts or situations but other times they seem more accepting of their situation and can look at their problems without getting hopeless about their difficulties.

Hazleton's book is nonetheless very worthwhile reading. The reader will be challenged to question their own views often and will be given very interesting perspectives on their bad feelings.

The major idea of this work is that we should not blame ourselves when we feel badly. Hazelton rightly argues that the culture tells us that we should be happy all the time, an unrealistic idea given the changing circumstances of any individual life. Hazelton teaches that we should not be guilty about our down feelings, that they are a normal part of our up and down lives. We all have disappointments and losses, difficulties and struggles.

I found especially helpful her words on the way we cover up our bad feelings, try to show others that we do not feel badly when we do. Her indication that all of us are depressed at one time or another is a way of telling us that we should not be blaming ourselves for this.

But I think Hazelton goes too far in her speaking about the way depressed people have a more realistic view of the world than the non- depressed. I also found her condemnation of 'cognitive psychology' wrongheaded and simplistic.

Anyone who knows people who are deeply depressed know that they do suffer from distortions in thinking and judgment. There are patterns of thinking in which the deeply depressed will always find the negative in any situation. I have the sense that 'cognitive therapy' can be of real help to many.

However once again Hazelton is to be commended for trying to teach us to not stigmatize ourselves when depressed, and to understand more realistically that life has its disappointments, difficulties and downsides for all of us.