ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the general nature of epidemic psychology and the special challenge it presents to public order. It considers some contrasting psychological and sociological explanations. The model has been built in the normal, inevitable but still fairly dubious way, moving back and forth from the particular features of AIDS to more general reflections on the hypothesised wider social form. Epidemic psychology is unusual, powerful and extremely disturbing. Epidemic psychology is a phrase with a double meaning. It contains within it a reference, not just to the special micro-sociology or social psychology of epidemics, but to the fact that that psychology has its own epidemic nature, quite separate from the epidemic of disease. The particular features of all three psycho-social epidemics need closer examination. The distinctive social psychology produced by large-scale epidemic disease can potentially result in a fundamental, if short-term, collapse of conventional social order.
