He had studied to become a specialist in psychiatry for over 20 years and was around 37 when he completed his training. Without difficulty, he could bring in 120,000 SEK per month (excluding tax) working only 50%, part-time, through his company — by serving as a senior psychiatrist, overseeing various clinics across the country. Yet he intensely despised psychiatry and often spoke about his lack of respect for the entire industry, which he said was only about managing socially maladjusted individuals — people who had lost their way — not by helping them, but by giving them powerful, addictive, and sleep-inducing drugs
The goal was to calm them down, make them accept their tragic fate in life or the mistreatment they had suffered from others, just to prevent them from getting angry or going mad. It was, in his eyes, a form of human trafficking that the pharmaceutical companies profited immensely from — with their cheap yet dangerous medications.
A common joke among the professors at his medical school — one that contained much truth — was that the students shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking they could actually cure anyone. Many psychiatrists, such as Anders Hansen (author of The Real Happy Pill and host of the TV program The Brain), have since stated publicly that before recommending any kind of medication, they would rather see their patients exercise every day — run, lift weights, spend time in nature, take cold baths, and be with loved ones.
Henrik Schalén — nicknamed “the witch doctor” by his classmates — believed instead in and practiced a communication model known collectively as Neuro-Semantics, an evolution of NLP’s core assumptions and linguistic tools. It claimed that illnesses arose because ideas had become mislinked in the brain — between sensory impressions and the body’s interpretations — causing communication problems both with the external world and within oneself, between the brain and the body. In his view, people were simply misprogrammed. If he could get them to let go of their current map of reality — their stories — and realize that they were mistaken, they were already 70% healed.
But Henrik himself was far from problem-free. He attended four different support groups for various addictions: narcotics, sex, and love addiction among them. Henrik Schalén — the chief psychiatrist who suffered from severe pornography problems — smoked cannabis every evening, sending explicit dickpics to random women on dubious dating sites, and constantly cheated on his Thai girlfriend, betraying her time and again. He often made up strange, detailed stories that served as constant diversions to confuse and mislead those he spoke with.
His apartment was a perpetual disaster zone: old food in the fridge, mold everywhere, pipette bottles filled with large amounts of LSD, Viagra, sleeping pills, and drugs of every kind. He short-circuited people’s worldview to draw energy to himself — but it was never a beautiful world he brought people into. Having access to prescription medication only made things worse. His dream, however, was to use the authority he had gained from his psychiatric education to one day practice Neuro-Semantics full-time. In his eyes, I was the devil. And yet, despite everything, we were good friends.
We shared many great and crazy memories — especially the times we took LSD together. One occasion stands out in particular, when he tricked me into dropping a Dalai Lama 300 micrograms blotter acid. He hadn’t mentioned the dosage at first, only saying it was “basically nothing.” The experience hit both of us quite hard when we wandered through the neighborhood in Skanstull, Metargatan, where he lives. I remember how Henrik was quite insistent and deliberate in reminding (or asking) me again and again about the fact that we actually live — as if he himself had begun to doubt that aspect of reality.
We went to this lovely restaurant and bought some exquisite husmanskost — roast beef, if I remember correctly — and carefully cooked vegetables. Back at his place, I ate it while listening to the genius blind jazz legend Mats Öberg, Sweden’s Stevie Wonder (A song for Amy) — and I couldn’t stop staring at the tiny carrots before me. They were so radiant, so impossibly beautiful, that tears started running down my cheeks. Their life force seemed to fill the entire room and animated everything in perfect harmony with the music.
A little later, lying on the sofa, we hugged each other tightly, as if we alone were floating through the universe together. My eyes were fixed on the big round lamp above us, which appeared like a hidden sun of creation. I couldn’t look away. That moment was, to say the least, overwhelming and achingly beautiful — a peak experience of perception and sensation.
Another time we were at St. Eriksplan — also unexpectedly intense; sitting on a small hill, eating quite expensive sandwiches, contemplating how we had probably existed forever and ever in countless iterations, creating ourselves and everything around us in infinite variations. And now, for some peculiar reason, we had co-created this moment together. Both him and I reflected on our respective Wills by acknowledging what was not our Wills, while concluding that the entirety of existence had to be nothing more than a grand joke.
And the greatest joke of all (within this grander joke), perhaps, was that Henrik, for some other peculiar reason, had created this dubious, insecure gay guy called Jonas — following him around, stalking him, perfectly exemplifying the principle of denial — a plausible perspective that sent us into uncontrollable laughter. These were vivid, strange, and beautiful times. And yet, in the end, I can’t really stand him.
