Tuppence Middleton is a beautiful, talented British actor, seen on stage, screen and TV. Now 39, she lives in a smart London suburb with her Swedish film director partner and their four-year old daughter. And she has OCD.

Scorpions, is a powerful, candid, and even funny, memoir of her life and how it has been overwhelmed by compulsive rituals and obsessive thought cycles. Published in 2025 to excellent reviews, it is now out in paperback.

At first, growing up in a happy family in Somerset, Middleton thought everyone followed regimes like hers, but then, when she was 11, her mother found her at the door of her bedroom going through her bedroom ritual, a 14-point schedule of systematic counting and focus.

For example, here’s just a portion of it:

• Starting with the closest corner on the left, look directly at it and begin to count: 1,2,3,4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
• If you take your eyes off the corner, you must start the count again.
• Once finished move one corner to the right and start again.
• Only move on to the next corner when fully satisfied.*

*Satisfaction occurs only when the anxiety stops and the tightness in the chest diminishes.

And if it wasn’t completed?

If you don’t finish the count, your parents will die.

If you don’t finish the count, the house will burn down.

If you don’t finish the count, you will be sick.

She could tell by her mother’s face as she explained what she did, that this was not usual behaviour, and so began various efforts to get to the bottom of what was soon diagnosed as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

As she explains, the disorder affects people differently. Following an earlier illness, she had emetophobia, a fear of vomiting. Connected to this was fear about the safety of food and drink, the danger of germs and infection, the chance of being killed by an air bubble in a syringe when having a blood test or being given a vaccine.

Although at first she refused, eventually in her 20s Middleton started on anti-depressants, recognised as good medication for OCD. She has had various types of therapy, including CBT and hypnotherapy, but also finds talking therapy beneficial.

In less than 200 pages Middleton deftly explains all the different ways OCD affects her life, from the mass of research she does into things that trigger her OCD fears, to how it fits in with her acting world, and life as the mother of a young child.

Middleton doesn’t over-promise, but she does present herself as someone who has OCD, but is not overwhelmed by it. She might not want to state it was less dominant, lest that immediately be proved wrong, but she does imply that her relationship with the scorpions, her name for “the writhing black mass inside my head” is more bearable, less extreme.

She does know how susceptible OCD sufferers can be, so the book is prefaced with a caution. Her descriptions are intended to provide an immersive experience of OCD, but “those with the condition could [them] distressing or disruptive to their own recovery, should they be vulnerable to adopting the compulsions of others. Please take care when reading.”