Steven Taylor, the author of book ‘the Psychology of Pandemics’ worked thirty years focusing on the research areas of anxiety disorders and related problems. This includes health anxiety also called as hypochondriasis. People who are called as hypochondriacs or the “worried well” are highly conscious about their health and are the most prone challenge to the treat but nevertheless hypochondriasis has always fascinated the author of this book. People with hypochondriasis are mostly worried about their health even after their doctors reassure them, often repeatedly, that their health is quite well. According to his views, the more he read about pandemics, more he realized that pandemics were essentially psychological phenomena. Pandemics are a result of people’s behavior and are not simply about virus infecting people. According to his views, psychology is important in how a society reacts to pandemics. When he was writing about such a topic he realized that he was onto something about which no one had ever looked at all the ways that psychology in this project study while drawing together research and historical information from diverse scientific specialties and numerous pandemics. He submitted his book proposal to his editor in 2019, before 10 months of COVID-19 outbreak but it was dismissed. But he didn’t leave the hope as he tried to explain that people focus on only what is immediately in front of us and usually ignores the longer-term consequences and later on the book was published few weeks before the COVID-19 outbreak. The last chapter of the book had a section- ‘A portrait of the next pandemic’. Virtually everything described in the book and in that chapter has happened already during the starting of pandemic. This book was originally written over a year before the world had encountered Covid-19 and that chapter was already taken into account by the author in his book.
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