Zoloft as My Soma

Introduction

In Brave New World, soma is the drug that keeps citizens content, compliant, and untroubled by the weight of real experience. When I started taking Zoloft, I worried about something similar—that I was trading authentic suffering for chemical comfort, blunting the edges that made me who I am. This is a post about why that framing was wrong, and what psychiatric medication actually does and doesn’t change.

Key Points

• The soma anxiety: fears about medication changing identity or dulling experience
• What SSRIs actually do at a functional level
• The difference between treating illness and altering personality
• Reflections on before and after: what changed and what stayed the same
• The stigma around psychiatric medication and why it persists

Conclusion

Zoloft didn’t make me a different person. It made me more capable of being the person I already was. The soma comparison gets it backwards—it’s the illness, not the treatment, that narrows your world.