Forced Swimming Test: Essays on family, mental health, neurodivergence and medication

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.