The Masthead

Healing Stories Network is edited and published by Shashank Bhosale.

I am an engineer by training, not a doctor, and this press exists because of something that happened to me rather than something I studied.

After being diagnosed with a series of chronic conditions — gastrointestinal disorders first, and the mental health difficulties that followed them — I did what most people do. I searched. I found clinical descriptions of my conditions written by people who had never had them, and I found forum threads that were fragmentary and hard to trust. What I could not find was the thing I actually wanted: an account by someone who had been where I was, written at length, honestly, including the parts that did not resolve.

So I started collecting them.

Healing Stories Network publishes anthologies of first-person patient testimony: 900 volumes across 51 areas of health. Each volume gathers fifty accounts on a single subject. We publish accounts of recovery alongside accounts of things that did not get better, because a collection containing only good outcomes would have been useless to me when I needed one.

These books are companion reading. They are not medical advice, and I am careful to say so on every volume, because I know what it is to be desperate enough to take advice from anywhere.

Questions, corrections, or a story of your own: support@healingstoriesnetwork.com