Semen Hluzman

Semyon Fishelevich Gluzman (; ; 10 September 1946 – 16 February 2026) was a Ukrainian psychiatrist and human rights activist.

Gluzman was also the president and founder of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association, founder of the American-Ukrainian Bureau for Human Rights, director of the International Medical Rehabilitation Center for the Victims of War and Totalitarian Regimes, and a member of the Council of Experts under the Ukraine's Ministry of Labor and Social Policy. He was co-chairperson of the Babi Yar Committee, and dissident and political prisoner. He held an M.D. qualification.

Life and career Gluzman was born in Kyiv on 10 September 1946 to a close-knit Jewish family. His father was doctor of medical sciences Fischel Gluzman (1904–1987). In 1968, he graduated from the Kyiv Medical Institute. After graduation, Gluzman started working in Ukrainian psychiatric hospitals and was offered a position at the Dnipropetrovsk Special Psychiatric Hospital in a city not far from the Black Sea.

He was the first psychiatrist in the Soviet Union to openly oppose Soviet abuse of psychiatry against dissenters. In 1971, Gluzman wrote an in-absentia psychiatric report on General Petro Hryhorenko, who spoke against the human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. Gluzman came to the conclusion that Hryhorenko was mentally sane and had been taken to mental hospitals for political reasons. While in prison, Gluzman and fellow inmate Vladimir Bukovsky jointly wrote A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents, published in Russian, English, French, Italian, German, and Danish.

In the 1980s, Gluzman (who was Jewish) turned down offers to migrate to Israel by "people sent from American synagogues" and even Soviet officials.

In 1991, Gluzman founded the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association (UPA) as an independent mouthpiece and created a commission to address grievances about civil rights violations by mental health administrators.

In recognition of his courage and commitment to ethical psychiatry, Gluzman was given the title of a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatry Association and the title of an Honorary Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1980.

In 2008, Gluzman was honored with the Geneva Prize for Human Rights in Psychiatry, presented to him at the XIV Congress of the World Psychiatric Association in Prague, for exceptional courage and adherence to ideals of humanism, for renunciation of using psychiatry against political dissidents as well as for dissemination of ethical principles during the reform of mental health service in Ukraine.

Gluzman coauthored many research papers covering psychiatry in Ukraine, the health consequences of the Chernobyl accident, their risk perceptions, suicidal ideation, heavy alcohol use, nicotine dependence, and intimate partner aggression.

Gluzman died on 16 February 2026, at the age of 79.

Gluzman's publications

Books on Soviet psychiatry

Prose and poetry

Research papers in English without co-authors

Research papers in English with co-authors

Research papers in Russian without co-authors

The paper was also published in:

Research papers in Russian with co-authors The paper was also published in

Research papers in Ukrainian

Articles, reports, interviews, chapters in books