Happy near-death experiences are considered positive. Why don’t I call unhappy ones negative?
Simple. Because “negative” suggests bad as opposed to good. And that is just plain misleading. It’s a characterization rather than a description.
A distressing NDE is emotionally painful, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. It hurts, but hurting often leads to discovering the source of a problem and getting past it. Pain is a symptom, not an end. Worked with carefully, a horrifying NDE can lead to near-miraculous changes of understanding and attitudes with good outcomes. Not negative at all.
On the other hand, a blissful NDE feels great at the time, but if it leads afterward to ego-inflation and an attitude of superiority (which is not uncommon, at least temporarily), or to excessive risk-taking or abandonment of family responsibilities, then, although happy in the moment, it was not genuinely a positive experience but destructive.
Recommendation: Dump “negative.” Instead, use a more specific adjective that actually describes what the experience was like: distressing, frightening, scary, painful, empty, threatening, hellish. If you use a different word, send it in a comment; we’ll start a list of all the adjectives people use to describe their NDEs.