Robert Goodman obituary

Leading child psychiatrist known for developing a simple questionnaire (SDQ) to determine the state of a young person’s mental health

In 1992 a man with poorly controlled schizophrenia climbed into the lions’ enclosure at London Zoo and was badly mauled. This and other horrifying incidents in the early 1990s prompted widespread concern about services for mentally ill people.

Better statistics were urgently required. Official surveys initially focused on adults, but in 1999 the Office for National Statistics decided to survey children and young people’s mental health for the first time, turning to the child psychiatrist Robert Goodman to guide their team of psychologists and statisticians.

As well as being a distinguished child psychiatrist, Goodman had invented two child psychiatric assessment tools that now underpin population surveys worldwide: the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and the Development and Well-Being Assessment (DAWBA).

Goodman, who has died aged 72, was professor of brain and behavioural medicine at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College, London, from 1990, and psychiatric consultant at the Maudsley hospital in south London. In 1995 he was asked to update the “Rutter scales” – screening questionnaires for children, composed by his previous boss, Michael Rutter.

Initially he was unenthusiastic, saying the task was unproductive, but quickly became fascinated with how to assess and measure behaviour, and from the Rutter scales he developed the far more useful and wide-ranging SDQ. He intentionally made it very short (one page only) so that users would npt get bored and, instead of focusing purely on problems, he included questions about a child’s strengths and the impact issues have on their lives.

Knowing how thinly stretched psychiatric services were, Goodman was inspired from 1996 to go further and develop the DAWBA, which is a package of interviews and questionnaires about a child’s mental health. The answers can be typed into a computer programme, which makes an assessment and predicts likely diagnoses. It can be very helpful for time-poor mental health professionals, and in wanting to use computers to assist in diagnosis Goodman was streets ahead of his time.

However, he could not persuade the NHS to fund his project, so, using more than £100k of his own money, he set up youthinmind.com, which offers both the SDQ and the DAWBA as well as a directory of mental health services.

Both the SDQ and DAWBA are cornerstones of epidemiological studies, including the ONS’s 1999 study The Mental Health of Children and Adolescents in Great Britain, which surveyed around 10,500 children. It was repeated in 2004 and found that 10% of children aged five to 15 had a mental disorder, far higher than expected. Goodman told the Guardian in 2008 that we should be appalled by these figures: “If it had been diabetes, it would be a national scandal.”

The studies inspired governments in Europe and across the world to carry out similar surveys using the SDQ and DAWBA. The SDQ alone has been translated into 89 languages including Zulu and Norwegian and has been used in more than 4000 research studies.

Goodman became fascinated with the science of translating questionnaires and how to use vocabulary accurately to reflect the nuances of different cultures. Not one to do things by halves, he taught himself many languages, sometimes learning by reading Harry Potter books in translation because he was familiar with the stories.

He was born in Edgware, north London, and had a younger sister, Alison. His father, Jack, who came from a family of eastern European Jewish immigrants, became prosperous designing and selling clothes and, with his wife, Barbara (nee Goldberg), set up the Kendal Hall Country Club for members of the Jewish community in the 1950s. In contrast to his socialite parents, Goodman was shy and bookish, preferring to walk in the nearby woods and catch newts.

While still a schoolboy, he read the Ecologist magazine and contacted its owner Teddy Goldsmith. This led to him spending time each summer on Goldsmith’s farm in Cornwall, where he imbibed forward-thinking green principles.

After attending Haberdashers’ Elstree boys’ school, in Hertfordshire, in 1972 Goodman won a scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, to study medicine, where he came top in physiology.

He then undertook his clinical training in Oxford, before moving back to Cambridge as a bye-fellow at Caius. In 1982 he held a post in paediatrics in Cambridge and at Great Ormond Street hospital in London, before moving to the Maudsley in south London in 1984. His boss there, Rutter, often described as “the father of modern child psychiatry”, inspired Goodman to make his career in this relatively new specialty.

Goodman remained at the Maudsley for the rest of his career, initially specialising in the brain injury condition hemiplegia. In 1991 he co-founded the charity HemiHelp.

He was immensely tall (6ft 6in) and so too was another young doctor at the Maudsley, Stephen Scott. Around the hospital, Goodman ironically referred to himself and Scott as “13 foot of terror”. Scott said: “He could say this because nowhere was there a more gentle and unthreatening man.”

With Scott, Goodman wrote Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, in 1997, to fill a gap as there was no useful summary of child psychiatry for other doctors who look after children, such as paediatricians or GPs. Goodman was a Buddhist and altruistic: he wanted to make the book freely available to anyone who needed it, so he negotiated with the publisher that he would update the book without charge if they made the previous edition free to download.

As well as his work with SDQ and DAWBA, Goodman published more than 140 academic papers on subjects ranging from autism and anxiety to callous and unemotional traits in children. He gave regular lectures at King’s, sometimes injecting a touch of humour, such as appearing with his hair dyed pink and blue when lecturing to students about how they should question authority.

He retired from the Maudsley at the age of 65. In 2022 he was awarded the Michael Rutter medal for lifetime achievement from the Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health.

Goodman married the psychotherapist Susan Lightbody in 1981 and they had three children, James, Anna and Rosa. The family lived in Dulwich, south-east London, where in 2014 he stood as a Green candidate in the local council election. His garden had an old air-raid shelter in which he meditated every day, and each year he attended a Buddhist retreat at Plum Village in south-west France.

Latterly Goodman developed dementia. He is survived by Susan, his three children, four grandchildren, and Alison.

• Robert Nicholas Goodman, child psychiatrist, born 15 November 1953; died 18 December 2025