Battling Soviet psychiatric punishment

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2020

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The story of Dr. Semen Gluzman, a Ukrainian psychiatrist, who took a stand against the psychiatric abuse of political dissidents in the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, Soviet authorities had many dissidents declared mentally ill and confined them to special psychiatric hospitals for 'treatment'. In the 1970s, a young Ukrainian psychiatrist, decided to write a counter-diagnosis of one of the most famous of these incarcerated dissidents. For this, he would pay a high price. Alex Last speaks to Dr Semen Gluzman about his struggle to oppose Soviet punitive psychiatry.

Photo: Semen Gluzman in 1989.(Gluzman)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.
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1:10.1	Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service with me Alex Last.
1:16.4	And today we go back to the 1970s and the story of a young Ukrainian psychiatrist who decided to take a stand against the psychiatric abuse of
1:25.2	political prisoners in the Soviet Union for which he himself would pay a very high price.
1:39.0	I was really romantic and I was thinking to be honest, and I was thinking to be honest, good kind psychiatrist.
1:45.0	I was not thinking about independence of Ukraine or Belarus or Russia.
1:50.0	I was thinking about one thing, freedom of speech.
	...

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