Cohen Miles-Rath

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1,309 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard May 2025 last heard 3 Jun

Cohen Miles-Rath’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard · Cohen Miles-Rath (on psychosis and recovery) · 3 Jun 2026 podcast

Love you.

Tony Mantor: Why Not Me ? · Cohen Miles-Rath: How One Man Transformed Crisis into a Call for Change · 22 May 2025 podcast

Yeah, I appreciate you having me.

I have been in the mental health advocacy field for more than a half a decade now. I worked at the Mental Health Association in New York State for five years. If you're familiar with the MHA Network on Mental Health America, they're an affiliate of theirs. And it was work around policy advocacy, implementing training throughout New York State, mental health-related training.

We offered a bunch of different trainings and so forth. In the past year, I moved on to the New York State Office of Mental Health, which I work for the Suicide Prevention Center, in which I do similar work, but geared towards suicide prevention. That's my professional space.

Now, I also have my own story with mental illness in which I've written a memoir about and I am publishing that memoir this year. I've spent about six years trying to get this thing published. And on top of that, I've been out doing speaking engagements, telling my story, sharing the peer perspective about going through systems such as incarceration and hospitalizations and so forth.

Yeah, so that's a great question because I did not have any inclination to accept anything the difficulties that I was facing with my mental health, which did increase to a severe mental health crisis until after the worst of my mental health crisis had happened. And that was the day that I came back from psychosis in jail, where I had come back to reality and realizing what had happened.

From that moment on, I did a complete 180, embracing mental health treatments, accepting my mental illness, and eventually getting to where I'm at today.

Due to the incidents that had happened between my father and I that I was arrested for, my first week in jail, I was in like a severe state of psychosis. I was in solitary confinement. And I'd experienced just this horrific situation in which When I did come back and realized what had happened, I wasn't sure I was ever going to get out. I had two felonies, potential felonies.

And fortunately, due to a lot of certain circumstances, the court recognized what had happened was clearly a result of a severe mental illness. And I'd been hospitalized twice before this too, so there was a little bit of history and past to that, in which I was able to get out of jail after 30 days. I had mandatory treatments. I was on probation for a year. It was a conditional discharge.

So it wasn't just I'm getting out. That's it. There were certain things that I had to do to maintain my freedom or everything could come back. And one felony was dropped. The other felony was reduced down to a misdemeanor. I did get that on my record.

How I like to frame that part of my experience is really through what's known as the four dimensions of recovery, which a lot of mental health organizations talk about the four dimensions of recovery, which are purpose, home, health, and community. So like when I got out of the jail, my mom opened up her home. My parents were separated. They had been separated all my life.

And due to the incident with my dad, he wasn't willing to let me live with him for valid reasons. It took a lot of us to build our trust together. But my mom opened the doors. She gave me a place of home, a place of comfort, a place where I could really just focus on managing my treatment. So like I lived with my mom. I picked up a job at Burger King, so I gained some independence.

Fortunately, I was in a spot where I could walk to work. I didn't have a car. I was able to walk to my treatment. I was seeing a psychiatrist or a nurse practitioner. I was seeing group therapy. I was seeing substance misuse therapy. And I was seeing a mental health counselor, like four things every week, right? And that's how dedicated my rehabilitation was to the health dimension.

A lot of that I had to do as part of my conditional discharge process. In that space, I was very vulnerable and I was very active in wanting to know how to manage my mental health and my diagnosis a lot better than I was before. So health home was taken care of. The community aspect, I still had a lot of friends.

I was in a community of support too that really, I think, supported me in getting through that process. And then lastly, purpose. Before I went to jail, I was going to college, a four-year degree at SUNY Geneseo, which is a small university in upstate New York. I was expelled after what happened when I got arrested.

I was able to get back in after I got out of jail, and there I was able to finish out my degree. I had a couple classes left. I was able to get my degree and a plan for the future, which was to pursue my master's degree in social work. So I had a purpose to my life that really helped me go from jail to grad school within a year or so, something like that.

It was a very tough time in my life. There were days because I'd have to walk a mile to Burger King to work. I was also taking medication and some of the side effects of the medication included feeling draggy and slow and like my creative thinking was gone. It's really tough. It was a really tough time because there were a lot of times I doubted myself.

And even when trying to get pursue a master's degree in social work, I had a huge stigma over my experience that I went through. I'd attacked my dad with a knife and that was in the local news, like when the incident happened. And that created barriers for me worrying about getting accepted in the grad school. Every grad school asked, have you ever been expelled from college? I had to say yes.

And then I had to share my story in a way that would get them to understand. There was a lot of doubt. And I like to think that I was really privileged to have all those four dimensions and really strengthen those four dimensions really helped me just keep that forward momentum going. I will also add that prior to all of this, I was also a big athlete all my life. I was a very

very dedicated distance runner. And a lot of those characteristics that I've learned in that sport, I think helped me to do the same in this process where you have to do a lot of hard work to get where you want to get and to be your idea of success with whatever it is.

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