Can books really affect your well-being?

In the past month, I've read or listened to the following books:

Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, Chris Crutcher: Fat boy is best friends with burned girl who was brutally abused by her dad and abandoned by her mom.

Deadline, Christ Crutcher: X-country jocko finds out he has a terminal disease with maybe a year to live, and decides not to treat it or tell anyone.

Fallen Angels, Walter Dean Myers: Young enlistees in the thick of Vietnam, 1966.

Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson: Girl is the school pariah after calling the cops from a party, which busted the party, but she never reported the reason for the call.

Stuck in Neutral, Terry Trueman: Kid with cerebral palsy narrates about his family, including his dad who wants to euthanize him.

Buried Onions, Gary Soto: Kid in the Fresno ghetto, trying to get out without getting killed.

Looking for Alaska, John Green: Three pranksters in boarding school, including the irrevocably damaged Alaska.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie: Kid from the res goes to town to discover himself, losing his best friend in the process; lots of people die.

What Happened to Cass McBride, Gail Giles: After a kid's suicide, his brother abducts and buries alive the girl whose note may have caused it.
Spanking Shakespeare, Jake Wizner: Insecure senior in high school finds out that his embarrassing parents aren't all that bad compared to the issues other kids face.

Breathing Underwater, Alex Flinn: Sophomore boy dates sophomore girl, boy beats the shit out of girl, girl presses charges and gets a restraining order, boy goes to anger management; and that's where the story begins.

Currently reading/listening to:

Sickened, Julie Gregory: Girl is brutalized by her mother in the form of Munchausen by proxy, and it doesn't help that Dad has a "mild and questionable" case of paranoid schizophrenia.

The Chocolate War, Robert Cormier: Boy in high school is initiated in a gang that terrorizes the private school they attend, then defies them, leading to all sorts of fun stuff.

So, class, what do all of these books have in common?
Pile this much desperation, brutality and suffering on top of a person, and they're bound to get stuck at the bottom. I actually find myself becoming inured to the problems of other people, becoming depressed in my thinking and behavior, and even quicker to anger when working with people. In short: I start acting like a teenager.
My biggest issue is that, of the above books, only 3 have a female voice, and *every* one of them have a female being brutalized or victimized in some way (except Chocolate War, which doesn't even have a female in it, not really...except for the dead mom). Even though the authors are split, male/female, the misogyny, the abuse and brutality aimed at the females in their books, serves to only marginalize females in the real world.
Yeah, all of these are required reading for one of my classes (except for Spanking Shakespeare... I just needed an audio book until I could get my hands on Chocolate War). So this is what we're teaching our YA librarians to be: depressed with internalized rage and dismissive of strong female characters who get to be the heroes *without* having to suffer some extreme humiliation or traumatic ordeal.

I'm cranky. Three guesses why...

When I'm done with this class, I'm so going to read me some Jane Austen...