In 1992 a man with poorly controlled schizophrenia entered the lion enclosure at London Zoo and was fatally shot. This and other horrific incidents in the early 1990s led to widespread concern about services for the mentally ill.
Better statistics were urgently needed. The official survey was initially focused on adults, but in 1999 the Office for National Statistics decided to conduct its first child and adolescent mental health survey, with child psychiatrist Dr. Robert Goodman to lead a team of psychologists and statisticians.
Also as a child psychologist, Goodman invented two child psychological assessment tools that now survey populations 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 behavioral medicine at King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience since 1990 and consultant psychiatrist at Maudsley Hospital, south London. In 1995 he was asked to update the “Rotter Scales” – screening questionnaires for children developed by his former boss, Michael Rotter.
At first he was reluctant, saying it was useless, but quickly became fascinated with how to assess and measure behavior, and developed the Rotter Scales into the more useful and comprehensive SDQ. He purposely made it very short (only one page) so that users would not be bored and instead of focusing only on problems, he included questions about the child’s strengths and the impact on their lives.
Realizing how poor psychiatric services were, Goodman was inspired in 1996 to go further and develop the DAWBA, which is a package of interviews and questionnaires about child mental health. Answers can be typed into a computer program, which evaluates and predicts a possible diagnosis. This could be very useful for time-poor mental health professionals, and Goodman was way ahead of his time in exploring the use of computers to aid in diagnosis.
However, he was unable to persuade the NHS to fund his project, so, using more than £100k of his own money, he founded Youthinmind.com, which offers the SDQ and DAWBA as well as a directory of mental health services.
Both the SDQ and the DAWBA have been the basis of epidemiological studies, including the ONS’s 1999 Study of Child and Adult Mental Health in Great Britain, which surveyed around 10,500 children. It was repeated in 2004 and found that 10% of children aged 5 to 15 had a mental disorder, much higher than expected. Goodman told the Guardian in 2008 that we should be surprised by these figures: “If this was diabetes, it would be a national scandal.”
The study encouraged governments in Europe and around the world to conduct 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 was interested in the science of translating questionnaires and how to accurately use vocabulary to reflect the nuances of different cultures. Not doing a job by halves, he taught himself many languages, sometimes reading the Harry Potter books in translation because he was familiar with the story.
He was born in Edgware, North London, and had a younger sister, Alison. His father, Jack, who came from a family of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, made a fortune designing and selling clothes, and with his wife Barbara (née Goldberg) founded the Kendall Hall Country Club in the 1950s for members of the Jewish community. In contrast to his social parents, Goodman was shy and bookish, preferring to roam the nearby woods and catch newts.
While still a school student, he read The Ecologist magazine and contacted its owner, Teddy Goldsmith. This led to him spending time every summer at Goldsmith’s Farm in Cornwall, where he applied forward-thinking green principles.
After studying at Elstree Boys’ School in Hertfordshire, Goodman won a scholarship in 1972 to study medicine at Gunville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he came first in physiology.
He then did his clinical training at Oxford, before returning to Cambridge as a Bay Fellow at Caius. In 1982 he worked in paediatrics in Cambridge and at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, before moving to Maudsley in South London in 1984. There his boss, Rutter, often described as “the father of modern child psychiatry,” encouraged Goodman to make his career in this relatively new specialty.
Goodman remained at Maudsley for the rest of his career, initially specializing in the brain injury condition hemiplegia. In 1991 he co-founded the charity HemiHelp.
He was very tall (6ft 6in) and so was another young doctor at Maudsley, Stephen Scott. Around the hospital, Goodman jokingly referred to himself and Scott as “terrorist 13 feet”. “He can say that because there’s no other person who’s more gentle and non-threatening,” Scott said.
With Scott, Goodman wrote Child and Adult Psychiatry in 1997, to fill the gap because there was no useful summary of child psychiatry for other doctors who treat children, such as pediatricians or GPs. Goodman was a Buddhist and an ascetic: he wanted to make the book available for free to anyone who needed it, so he negotiated with the publisher that he would update the book at no cost if they made the previous version free for download.
As well as his work with SDQ and DAWBA, Goodman has published more than 140 academic articles on topics ranging from autism and anxiety in children to difficult and non-emotional traits. He gave regular lectures at King’s, sometimes using humor, such as his hair appearing to be dyed pink and blue, when lecturing students on how they should question authority.
He retired from Maudsley at the age of 65. In 2022 he was awarded the Michael Rutter Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Society for Child and Adult Mental Health.
Goodman married psychotherapist Suzanne Lightbody in 1981 and they had three children, James, Anna and Rosa. The family lived in Dulwich, south-east London, where he stood as a Green candidate in the local council elections in 2014. His garden contained an old air-raid shelter where he meditated daily, and every year he attended a Buddhist retreat in the village of Plum in southwestern France.
Later Goodman developed dementia. He is survived by Susan, his three children, four grandchildren and Alison.
#Death #Robert #Goodman