AIM: The purpose of the study was to compare the risk of psychiatric disturbance among sighted and vision-impaired children aged 11 years. METHOD: Scores from the parent and teacher versions of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) were used to compare sighted children with: vision-impaired children; vision-impaired children with no other reported disabilities or special educational needs; and children with vision impairment and additional disabilities or special educational needs. Logistic regression was used to measure the associations between the independent variables and SDQ scores, and to test for significance of the observed differences. RESULTS: Both parents and teachers scored vision-impaired children significantly higher on the SDQ compared with sighted children (p