Forced Swimming Test
Essays on family, mental health, neurodivergence and medication
Published on 30. June 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
86 pages
978-1-917617-15-4 (ISBN)
Description
Eva Aldea's Forced Swimming Test is a fiercely intelligent, unflinchingly honest meditation on mental health, neurodivergence, and the uneasy interplay between personal distress and systemic forces. In four interwoven essays, Aldea interrogates the legacy of her father's death and her mother's suicide attempts, while navigating her own lifelong relationship with antidepressants and a late diagnosis of neurodivergence. Moving between personal experience, critical analysis, and philosophical inquiry, she scrutinises the ways in which suffering is medicalised, emotion is pathologised, and capitalism demands resilience above all else. This is a work of rare clarity and depth-rigorous, unsettling, and ultimately transformative.
More details
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 203 mm
Width: 127 mm
Thickness: 6 mm
Weight
103 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-917617-15-4 (9781917617154)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Eva Aldea is a writer and artist, lecturer and editor. Her first novel Singapore (Holland House Books, 2023), and her book in progress, Stockholm, explore migration and belonging. She has written about the experience of taking nude selfies as a way of exploring body image and the gaze in the pamphlet Possible Selves (Intergraphia Books, 2024). Eva is interested in the relationship between diagnoses, physical and psychological, and writing, and edits writers' reflections on how these affect their craft on the website Dx: Diagnosis and Writing. Eva teaches literature, critical theory and creative writing. She is also freelance Editor in Chief at W.R.K.S Games.