Books

A South African psychologist diagnosed with ADHD at age 50 shares her raw, unfiltered memoir of finally understanding the puzzle pieces of her life.
Are you a smart woman who has spent decades feeling broken and ashamed, only to discover you have ADHD? You’re not alone.
For many women, the signs of undiagnosed ADHD linger just beneath the surface,...

My husband has ADHD and leaves cupboards open, I have ADHD and slam them shut—this is our love story. After my late diagnosis at 50, our 25-year marriage finally made sense: the GPS fights that felt like war, crying over “lost” suitcases circling on carousels, and why saying “relax” to an ADHD spouse should be considered hostile. This memoir...

As a psychologist with ADHD diagnosed at fifty, I’ve spent twenty-six years being brilliant at my work while my workplace systems collapsed around me.

This is a memoir about ADHD in the workplace—the gap between potential and performance, the exhaustion of masking at work, and what it means to be genuinely good at your job while catastrophic at...

You’re not losing your mind. You’re losing your estrogen. And your estrogen was doing a lot of work you never knew about.

At forty-nine, Dr. Melanie du Preez — a clinical psychologist with twenty-six years of experience diagnosing ADHD in others — stood in her own shower, shampoo in hand, with no idea what to do next. Not in a philosophical way....

Four years after her ADHD diagnosis at fifty, South African clinical psychologist
Melanie du Preez is not recovered. She still walks into her colleague’s office at the
psychiatric clinic where she has worked for twenty-six years and goes completely
blank. She still freezes on the couch while her brain issues commands her body
ignores. She still...

You are not too sensitive. You are not too emotional. You are not a lot.
You are, in all likelihood, undiagnosed.
Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria — RSD — is a feature of the ADHD nervous system that produces intense, often overwhelming emotional responses to perceived rejection, criticism, or failure to meet the expectations of people who matter to...

Book 1 gave you the name. This book shows you where it actually lives. RSD doesn’t stay in one place. It shows up in the marriage, in the meeting room, in a body renegotiating its own rules in midlife, and in a child who inherited the same wiring you did. Most books would split that into four tidy chapters and pretend the boundaries hold. They...

When it is actually happening, you do not need theory. You need to know what to do next.

The meeting where your voice goes. The message from a relative you were not ready for. The 3 a.m. when the shame gets loud. The touch you wanted and flinched from anyway. These are the ten-minute stretches that trauma is really made of, and they arrive with...

You know the feeling. The manager conversation you keep rehearsing and abandoning. The family gathering you cannot face. The moment you realise you cannot keep going the way you have been going. Understanding burnout is one thing. Knowing what to actually say and do in the middle of a specific, difficult moment is another.
Burnout to Balance: The...

If you are living with the long effects of PTSD, complex trauma, or a difficult childhood — and especially if you are autistic or have ADHD — you may have noticed that most trauma books were not written with you in mind.

Some things happen once, and then refuse to stay in the past.

The hypervigilance that never quite switches off. The difficulty...

You are exhausted in a way that sleep does not fix. You have tried the holiday. You have tried resting more, caring less, pushing harder. None of it has touched what is actually wrong, because what is actually wrong is not tiredness — it is burnout, and burnout is a physiological state, not a mood.
Dr. Melanie du Preez, a clinical psychologist...

This is not a book you read from beginning to end.

It is a reference. A practical one, designed for the moment something is actually happening — you are about to walk into the room you cannot bring yourself to enter, the anxiety has just spiked in the meeting, the spiral started at 3am and is still running.

Quiet the Noise: The Field Guide is the...

Your brain is not broken.

It is doing exactly what it was designed to do. The problem is that the design is old, the environment has changed, and nobody issued an update.

Quiet the Noise is a book about anxiety — what it actually is, why some brains are more prone to it than others, and what you can realistically do about it. It is not a book that...

Recovery from an eating disorder doesn’t pause for dinner parties, doctor’s appointments, or Tuesday mornings in the supermarket. It happens in ordinary life — in the moments before a meal, in a changing room, across a table from someone who knew you when you were sick.

Reclaiming You: The Field Guide is a practical companion for adults in...

For autistic adults, ADHD adults, and AuDHD adults who want practical strategies for making friends and building social connection, this field guide offers something the standard loneliness self-help books don’t: scenario-based, clinically grounded approaches written for a brain that processes the social world differently.

You know the feeling....

You drafted the email. You just never sent it.

You said yes to three things you cannot do on the same Saturday. You were twenty minutes late to a meeting you knew about for a week. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you have decided this means something is wrong with you as a person.

It does not. But the explanation you have been using —...

The book you read in the car park before walking back inside.
You know the theory. You’ve read about neurodivergence, maybe even done the deeper work of understanding your brain. But right now you’re sitting outside a work function, or staring at a message you can’t reply to, or trying to decide whether the family braai is worth the three-day...

You know exactly what you should be doing. You just can’t make yourself do it.

You’ve read the articles. You understand the neuroscience. You can explain rejection sensitive dysphoria to someone else while simultaneously experiencing it so intensely you can’t get out of bed. And still, somewhere underneath all that understanding, the quiet...

If you’re recovering from an eating disorder—anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating disorder—or trying to, or stuck somewhere in the middle, this recovery workbook offers something most eating disorder books don’t: honesty about neurodivergent minds. Written by a clinical psychologist with 26 years of experience treating eating disorders, Reclaiming...

You are not bad at people. You are exhausted from pretending to be someone else.

Loneliness is not a character flaw. It is not evidence of being fundamentally broken or socially deficient. It is a predictable outcome — of years of masking, of a nervous system calibrated for threat, of a social world that was never designed with your brain in...