Excuse me while I go full Dr. Phil for a moment...
We increasingly live in a world where people want to deny reality and demand others engage in fantasy/alternate realities. I identify as X. I feel better that way. Oh, well we want you to feel better (we're good after all and want to do good things, and making someone feel better is good), you can have whatever reality you want and we will accept it. Do we tell the 70 year old addicted to plastic surgery that everything they are doing doesn't, in fact, make them look 30 again, and maybe encourage them to try therapy to help them accept the inevitabilities of aging? Or do we just take their money and make them look like a lizard person? Do we tell the morbidly obese person that they are beautiful and there's nothing wrong with them, or tell them they are harming themselves by over-eating?
You have widely metastatic disease but want to be a curable cancer patient? Well, that presents a number of ethical and legal issues for me then. You just don't want to talk about it and tell me to treat how I think is right? That's ok, that's different. We won't talk about it then. Because you told me you acknowledge the reality is bad, and you just don't want to dwell on it.
The compassionate thing to do is always to help people accept reality, not engage their fantasies of how to avoid it. Unfortunately, this is harder to do and makes you the "bad guy" because it goes against the innate desire we have to "be good" by making other people feel good in the short term, which always has the trade off of pain in the long-term.
