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==