Swimming to the Horizon: Crack, Psychosis, and Street-Corner Social Work

Swimming to the Horizon: Crack, Psychosis, and Street-Corner Social Work

Swimming to the Horizon is a look at the bottom rungs of the community mental health system, where clinicians with little experience or training often work with patients holding together lives burdened by drug addiction, severe psychosis, poverty, and generations of trauma. Zak Mucha took over an assertive community treatment team created to provide twenty-four seven clinical services for a client population we typically only see on the local news when police interventions turn into tragedies. In Swimming to the Horizon, we learn that therapy is provided not merely in fifty-minute sessions but in those moments spent attending to life in flophouse hotels, emergency rooms, grocery stores, alleyways, and courtrooms. "Zak Mucha's combination of honesty, furious compassion, and irresistible storytelling makes him one of the most important contemporary public intellectuals." -Dogo Barry Graham, Zen Monk and Author of Kill Your Self: Life After Ego "Zak's stories are a beacon, a bright window into what it is like to endeavor to walk alongside, rather than look down on, those who this world has punished again and again. . . . incredibly touching, funny, and well written." -Pfeffer Eisin, MA, LCPC, Director of the Erikson Institute DCFS Early Childhood Project, Psychotherapist, and Fellow Swimmer ". . . a brave, compassionate, often hilarious book about the true cost of helping others, and all that we get in return." -Trey Bundy, Journalist at The Center for Investigative Reporting ". . . a compelling and readable book of stories about real people and hard times." -Joel Dvoskin, PhD, Former President of the American Psychology-Law Society, Former Acting Commissioner of NY State Office of Mental Health "People say the word 'empathy' a lot these days. This book gives you a look at what it means and what it takes to actually do it." -Annia Ciezadlo, Journalist and Author of Days of Honey Zak Mucha, LCSW, is a psychoanalyst in private practice and president of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. He spent seven years working as the supervisor of an assertive community treatment (ACT) program, providing twenty-four seven services to persons suffering from severe psychosis, substance abuse issues, and homelessness. Mucha has worked as a counselor and consultant for US combat veterans undergoing training for digital forensic investigations in child pornography.Before going into the clinical field, Mucha worked as a freelance journalist, truck driver, furniture mover, construction worker, union organizer, staff member at a juvenile DCFS locked unit, and taught briefly at a women's prison. He is the author of Emotional Abuse: A Manual for Self-Defense as well as two collections of poetry, The Ambulatorium and Shadow Box, and a novel, The Heavyweight Champion of Nothing.