All too often, the most vulnerable populations fall through the cracks in our social safety nets: people dealing with addiction, homelessness and severe psychosis. Zak Mucha, the president of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, says this happens when the people serving those populations don’t understand what they need.

“‘Are they like me or not?’ That's how a lot of these decisions are made,” he said.

Mucha spent the early years of his social work career working on the ground on Chicago’s North Side to provide clients with direct services. Now, he has documented those experiences in his book “Swimming to the Horizon: Crack, Psychosis, and Street-Corner Social Work.”

In this episode, host Erin Allen talks to Mucha about his book and what he learned from his years working in community mental health services.