Mending Reality

An Advocate's Existential Journey with Mental Health

By: Cohen Miles-Rath, Vince Granata - foreword

Narrated by: Christopher P. Brown

After being incarcerated for nearly killing his dad due to a psychosis-induced prophetic vision, Cohen Miles-Rath wishes to support others with their mental health challenges.

Cohen Miles-Rath, an elite runner and first-generation college student, attacked his dad with a knife. He thought he was saving humanity by killing Satan—the universe demanded it of him as the Prophet. However, he was deceived by mania and psychosis, and, soon after, was arrested at gunpoint.

Cohen's love for his dad couldn't stop mental illness from nearly destroying their lives. But effective intervention could have. He had been hospitalized twice. What went wrong? Since jail, Cohen has managed schizoaffective symptoms and substance misuse, confronted his painful past, and obtained a social work master's degree. Now, he's a mental health advocate.

Cohen's transformational journey—having overcome a maniacal, reality-shattering illness—will inspire hope in those seeking insight with mental health.

©2025 Cohen Miles-Rath (P)2025 Tantor Media

Honest and vulnerable with clarity

I finished this memoir and want to put it directly in your hands. Once I started I had difficulty putting it down.
Cohen writes from inside the experience of psychotic disorder — tracing the early signs of the prodromal phase, the slow unraveling through mania and psychosis, and the unimaginable moment when he attacked his beloved father while believing he was fulfilling a divine mission.

What makes this book extraordinary is not just the story itself, but how it is told. Cohen writes from fractured and distorted memories and still produces a coherent, compelling narrative that pulls you forward toward its hopeful conclusion.
His love for his father couldn’t stop mental illness from nearly destroying their lives. But effective intervention could have.
For those of who have watched a family member move through the early phases of serious mental illness — searching for language, reaching for a system that wasn’t there — this book will bring things back.The prodromal arc is written with truth and vulnerability.
So is Cohen’s honesty about co-occurring substance use, a dimension of the illness often left out of discussion as well as treatment.
The system failed Cohen and his family more than once.
He was hospitalized twice before the crisis. This book asks, plainly what went wrong — and why the gaps in care so often swallow people before anyone intervenes with enough substance or continuity to matter.
And yet the book left me hopeful.
Cohen emerged through to the other side and became an advocate, an MSW, a person who turned his experience into something that serves others.
I hope you will read it and allow his story to inform you about serious mental illness, the systemic gaps, and the journey toward recovery.

Fascinating and brave

Very raw and truthful. Gave a fascinating window into mental illness and in my case dispelled a lot of the fear around it.