New Delhi, Aug 7 - Rajan Gupta returned after a business trip to the US recently and rushed to see his psychiatrist the very next day as he feared he had swine flu, the viral disease that has killed a 14-year-old girl and affected over 600 people in India.

Fifty-year-old Gupta is not the only one. Call it fear psychosis or hysteria, but general practitioners in the capital are not the only ones reporting a sudden spurt in patients. Psychiatrists are dealing with the problem too with patients convinced they have swine flu, even if they don't have any symptoms, knocking at their doors -- this trend has become more pronounced after the first swine flu death in the country in Pune on Monday.

'Even those who have a common cold or seasonal flu due to weather change think they have swine flu. And those with psychological problems or a phobia are the worst impacted,' said M.S. Bhatia, head of the psychiatry department at the Guru Tegh Bahadur Hospital.

Bhatia said he has seen a number of cases in the past few weeks where people think they have the virus. Most people, he added, don't know the difference between a common flu and swine flu but imagine they have it.

Like the 55-year-old man who came to him because he was afraid of flying and feared he would get the H1N1 influenza.

'He wanted to meet his son in Singapore. But since he had heard that those going abroad are getting the influenza, he refused to go despite his wife's plea. We had to really counsel him,' Bhatia told IANS.

'After the death of the (Pune) girl, the panic level has gone up. It is bound to happen as it is a natural worry. We advise them and give them medication. In some cases, we refer them for tests so that the fear eases out after they find they don't have it,' he added.

Samir Parikh, consulting psychiatrist at the Department of Mental Health and Behavioural Sciences at Max Healthcare, said the hysteria was based on fear psychosis.