SHIFTING GROUND: When Hormones Meet ADHD : A Psychologist’s Memoir of Perimenopause, Late Diagnosis, and the Body That Stopped Cooperating (The Jigsaw Mind Series Book 4)

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. In a genuine, my-brain-has-blanked way.

She was certain she had early-onset dementia. What she actually had was perimenopause crashing into undiagnosed ADHD at full speed.

Shifting Ground is the fourth book in the Jigsaw Mind Series — a memoir for women over forty who are suddenly finding that everything that used to work has stopped. The strategies, the coping mechanisms, the professional competence, the ability to hold a sentence together. All of it: gone.

This isn’t a self-help book. There is no five-step fix. Dr. du Preez writes about calling a teaspoon a “sugar scooper” in front of eighteen colleagues and laughing like she’d meant to. About yelling at her dog for the first time in her life and standing in the kitchen horrified at herself, wooden spoon in hand. About showing up for patients at Parkmed while running a pre-flight checklist on a brain that was clearly not cleared for take-off.

You’ll find yourself in these pages if you are a woman over forty whose ADHD symptoms have suddenly and dramatically worsened, someone who has recently been diagnosed with ADHD or suspects she should be, navigating perimenopause and wondering why nobody warned you it would affect your brain like this, a professional trying to hold it together at work while falling apart everywhere else, or exhausted by toxic positivity and looking for someone who tells the truth about what this actually feels like.

What this book covers: the neuroscience of why estrogen loss makes ADHD dramatically worse — explained through lived experience, not lecture. The working memory, emotional regulation, and sensory processing changes that hit during perimenopause. Building practical accommodation systems that work with your brain instead of demanding more from it. The workplace, the relationships, the body — each piece of the puzzle shifting at once. What acceptance actually looks like when it finally arrives.

Dr. du Preez writes the way she talks: like a friend at a café who happens to have a PhD and a spectacularly unreliable working memory. She is not recovered. She is not transformed. She is managing — with exasperated resilience — and she is honest about every bit of it.

This is the book she needed to find when she was standing in that shower, terrified. It is for every woman who has convinced herself it’s just stress. It isn’t.

The Jigsaw Mind Series: Book 1: Puzzle Pieces Book 2: Jigsaw Hearts Book 3: Working Pieces Book 4: Shifting Ground Book 5: Finding the Picture