In Memoriam: Eulogizing 2 Great Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists
Key Takeaways
- Public-facing scholarship and media engagement helped normalize pediatric OCD, translating clinical phenomenology into widely understood narratives while preserving a rigorous research agenda.
- Clomipramine emerged as a key pharmacologic option for childhood OCD, illustrating how antidepressant mechanisms can address intrusive thoughts and compulsive behaviors in pediatric populations.
Remembering 2 child and adolescent psychiatrists...
PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS
I am not a child and adolescent psychiatrist, but it has always seemed to me to generally be more complex and challenging to work with children and adolescents because of the developmental processes and family complexities. At the same time, perhaps that uniqueness offers the potential for greater positive change.
Recently, 2 of those psychiatrists from 2 different countries passed away, having had careers full of great advances in the understanding and treatment of psychiatric disorders in our youth.
Judith L. Rapoport, MD: The Psychiatrist Who Could Not Stop Helping Our Youth
It is a rarity for a psychiatrist to become well-known by the general public. Our work is so private and confidentiality is so ethically important to keep. Judith L. Rapoport, MD, was an exception.1 She led a great advance in understanding and helping those with intrusive thoughts and repetitive behaviors, especially in the young. The associated stigma was thereby reduced, too.
Her research and study led to the best-selling 1989 book, The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing,2 modeled after the 1985 popular book of the neurologist Oliver Sacks.3 She successfully appeared multiple times on TV, including Oprah.
She added a cutting-edge biological neuroscience perspective. Most importantly for these difficult to treat patients, she found that the antidepressant chlomipramine could often treat obsessive-compulsive disorder in children—and then later also for dogs. She also added pivotal studies about attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and childhood schizophrenia. All the while, she was a model pioneer for women physicians.
For most of her career, from 1984-2017, when she retired as Emeritus in her early 80s, she was chief of the new child psychiatry branch at the National Institutes of Mental Health. She received multiple awards and trained many proteges, leaving the field with such valuable legacies when dying on March 7, 2026, at the age of 92. An obituary commentary by a colleague, Russell Schacher, MD, FRCPC, on March 18 notes:
“Judy was always warm and interested in other people. Intelligence oozed out of her pores. She knew more biology than most biologists I met, touched with a profound and rare humanity. I am not surprised to learn for the first time that she was a psychoanalyst.”
Robert Goodman, MD: Simplifying Complicated Childhood Assessment
Perhaps because he worked in Great Britain, I missed the loss of Robert Goodman, MD, who died on December 18, 2025, at the age of 72 from complex dementia.
As his friend and colleague Stephen Scott conveyed in his Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health obituary, to practically condense the complexity of child psychiatry, he developed the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire, which went on to be used around the world. Along with Dr Scott, he wrote a valuable textbook.4 Not only that, but he ended up persuading the publisher to let it be downloaded for free. Most of his career was at the Institute of Psychiatry.
Personally, he was modest and often made childlike fun of himself while lecturing, such as dying his hair red on one side and blue on the other. Passionate about the environment, he was a longstanding member of the Green Party. The climate and its instability are so crucial for the future of our current youth.
He supplemented his Jewish heritage by also becoming Buddhist. For his own well-being and one model of psychiatrist self-care that mainly came out of the Buddhist tradition, he meditated daily. May his memory also be a blessing.
Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specializes in the social, cultural, ethical, spiritual, and religious aspects of psychiatry, and since 2012 is in retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekdays column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He has been an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physical burnout, and xenophobia, among other social justice causes, serving on many related local and national community and professional Boards. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.
References
1. Smith H. Judith Rapoport dies at 92. Her best-selling book introduced readers to OCD. Washington Post. March 21, 2026. Accessed April 7, 2026.
2. Rapoport J. The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing: The Experience and Treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Berkeley; 1991.
3. Sacks J. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Vintage; 2021.
4. Goodman R, Scott S. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Wiley-Blackwell; 2012.
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