Puzzle Pieces: A Psychologist's ADHD Memoir of Late Diagnosis at 50 - Paperback

by Melanie Du Preez (Author)

"I gave it to my kids. I am Patient X."

Dr. Melanie du Preez spent twenty-six years diagnosing ADHD - in children, teenagers, university students, her own kids. She was fifty before a friend's one-word reply ("Really?") made her finally ask the question about herself.

Puzzle Pieces is what happened next: the self-assessment she completed alone at her kitchen table, the decades of "too much," "too sensitive," and "not trying hard enough" suddenly making sense, and the slow, funny, occasionally furious work of understanding a brain that was never broken - just running on a different operating system.

This isn't a clinical textbook, and it isn't a superpower narrative either. It's the ten kilos of rice bought by accident. The dining table that became a filing system. The "robot mode" that got her through other people's crises and cost her the ability to speak by the time she got home. The grief that showed up only after the relief did.

Written for the women who suspect, the women just diagnosed, and the women who've spent a lifetime translating themselves for a world that never came with the right instructions, Puzzle Pieces offers:

- The Jigsaw Mind framework for understanding ADHD as different wiring, not a deficit

- A psychologist's-eye view of masking, burnout, rejection sensitive dysphoria, and diagnostic grief

- Practical strategies you can use before, during, or without a formal diagnosis - no toxic positivity, no "just try harder"

- The real, unglamorous story of raising ADHD kids while undiagnosed yourself

Dr. Melanie du Preez is a clinical psychologist with 26+ years of experience in ADHD assessment and treatment, based in Klerksdorp, South Africa. Puzzle Pieces is Book 1 of The Jigsaw Mind series.

Your brain isn't broken. You just finally have the instructions.