Torn Singer Natalie Imbruglia Got an ADHD and OCD Diagnosis in Her Late 40s: “You Name It, There’s A Sprinkle Of It”
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The diagnoses came decades after she topped charts around the world, and they explain something she’d carried for years. She calls her neurodiversity a superpower, but says one part of it still trips her up: the way she unravels in the minutes before she walks on stage.
Imbruglia told The Sunday Times she was diagnosed in midlife, joining a growing wave of women who learn late in life that they’re neurodivergent. She frames the labels as a positive: “It’s not a negative, it’s my superpower.”
The exception is the nerves. Being on stage is her happy place, she says, but the stretch right before a show is “absolutely awful,” and perimenopause, which hit her about five years ago, made it worse. “Let’s just say it was a grieving process. I was really angry. I fell off a cliff. It felt like someone had taken some of my personality.” HRT and a chance restaurant run-in with Davina McCall helped her find her footing.
The interview, published July 11, was picked up widely on July 13, her first time laying out the dual diagnosis and the perimenopause context in one place. The themes track her new music: lead single “Upside Down” is about the failure of trying to power through emotional dysregulation, and the title track “Algorithm” was inspired by her own late-night scrolling.
The through line runs back to the song that made her. “Torn” was already about inner turmoil and disillusionment nearly 30 years ago, the “all out of faith,” “lying naked on the floor,” “illusion never changed into something real” of a 22-year-old who had plenty of words for emotional chaos and no diagnosis to hang them on. The vocabulary she’s using now, the unraveling, the dark places, the falling off a cliff, is the same territory a billion Spotify streams already know by heart.
She’s 51 now and says she’s more comfortable in her skin than she’s ever been. Her album Algorithm, her first in five years, arrives September 4 on her own label, Landgirl Records.
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