An unusual psychosis story

There's another good "The Great Read" article up at the New York Times about a guy who developed schizophrenia and tried to kill his father.   He has since got it under control, and holds down a job, has a baby and is reconnected to his father.   

It's quite unusual to read a "success story" that solid for someone who did something so drastic.

Not so unusual to read this part leading up to his breakdown:

Cohen’s story began with an ordinary disappointment his senior year at SUNY College at Geneseo: An injury had ended his career as a distance runner. Freed from that regimented life, Cohen began smoking pot daily. That spring he sensed something changing about the world; it shimmered before him. He glided around campus, his senses exquisitely heightened.

Signals began to jump out at him in the form of colors; red meant danger, blue meant safety. Sitting in his humanities classroom, he saw — or thought he saw — his professor climb up to the podium and announce that he, Cohen, was a prophet. 

Turns out the father really should have know better (to recognise a problem developing in his son) but he had his own history of mental health issues:

 Sitting in the room where it happened, Randy explained: He had not realized his son was psychotic. He had listened to Cohen’s discourses about Einstein’s theory of relativity, his fear that the sun was liquefying rocks deep inside the Earth. But Randy was a blue-collar guy. Cohen was an intellectual, the first person in his family line to go to college.

“I thought, man, he’s smarter than me, so he probably knows more than me,” he said.

There had been warnings, it turned out. A month before the attack, after buttonholing a professor to share his rapturous ideas, Cohen was detained by the local police and committed to a psychiatric hospital for five days for observation.

But Randy was skeptical of psychiatry; when he was Cohen’s age, he had been prescribed medication after a suicide attempt, but he stopped taking them as soon as he could. His attitude, he said, was “more pick up your bootstraps and do what you got to do.” On the way home from the hospital, Cohen admitted he had lied about his symptoms to get out. The two of them discussed whether Cohen should take the antipsychotic medication he had been prescribed, and decided it wasn’t necessary.

 Anyway, seems to be a case of all's well that ends well.  The guy needs to watch his baby's mental health in future, though....