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adverts with crashing gravestones and the catchphrase ‘AIDS: Don’t Die of Ignorance’.
    Not surprisingly, HIV and Aids quickly replaced the Cold War nuclear threat – of the Frankie Goes to Hollywood song ‘Two Tribes’ and Raymond Briggs’s book When the Wind Blows – as the Great Fear of popular culture, and soaked through to the manners of day-to-day life. ‘A man round the corner in Boundary Lane has Aids,’ my mother, not known for her mealtime jokes, announced to us one night in the late 1980s. ‘Yes, he’s got one in each ear.’
    Australia had it even worse. The government there screened a frankly horrific advert that showed HIV as a grim reaper who knocked down people – including a sobbing schoolgirl and a mother with baby – with bowling balls, and had their bodies dragged away as garbage. *
    A generation was traumatized – as early as 1983, just a couple of years after HIV was identified, the first cases of what was then called Aids-phobia were reported – two men in their thirties, both with underlying mental conditions, who tested negative for HIV but were crippled by their fear of the disease. By 1987, so concerned that irrational obsessions with HIV were spreading faster than the virus itself, experts convened a special workshop in Munich to discuss ways to tackle the problem.
    This reaction to the threat of HIV is an example of how obsessions can closely mirror society’s fears and anxieties. In the 1920s, doctors in the US reported a surge in what they called ‘syphilis-phobia’, which coincided with a campaign to highlight the dangers of the disease. In the 1960s and 1970s there was a spike in irrational fears of asbestos, just as the dangers of the material had come to popular attention. By the 1980s and 1990s it was HIV. The US psychiatrist Judith Rapoport wrote in her book The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing – which introduced many people to OCD – that by 1989 a third of her obsessive-compulsive patients focused on HIV and Aids. The disease, she wrote, appeared ‘so terrifying, so irrational that it could have been the creation of an obsessive-compulsive’s worst fantasy’.
    In this new century, society has a new topic to obsess it. In 2012 Australian scientists reported the first cases of obsessive-compulsive patients who fixate on thoughts about climate change – a bogeyman for the new millennium and one that, similar to Aids in the 1980s, poses an uncertain, universal threat, depicted in lurid detail by the mass media. * Some of these people fear that increased temperatures will evaporate the water they leave out for their pet cats and dogs, and so they check the bowls time and time again. Others repeatedly make sure that taps, heaters and cooker are not left on, not because they fear the consequences for themselves, but because of the perceived impact of their negligence on water resources and greenhouse gas emissions, and so on the fate of the planet. One was obsessed with the idea that global warming would make his house fall down. He compulsively checked the skirting boards, pipes and roof for cracks, and repeatedly opened and closed its wooden doors to make sure that climate change had not brought a plague of termites.
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    Psychiatrists have traditionally viewed OCD as an anxiety disorder, along with conditions like phobia. Certainly, obsessions can appear similar to phobias, which are likewise exaggerated and often irrational fears. The anxiety caused by OCD and phobia are the same, and so is the sense of helplessness and impotence, and the awareness on some level that it’s all a bit silly. But people with phobias have one escape that those with OCD do not: they can usually avoid the stimulus that provokes their fear. Someone with an acute fear of heights can refuse to stand near the edge of a high bridge, or to walk along cliffs. Arachnophobia is only a