https://blog.thomas-bray.com/tags/medication/Recent content in Medication on Rabid CuriosityHugoen-usThomas BrayTue, 17 Mar 2026 09:15:00 -0500https://blog.thomas-bray.com/posts/zoloft-as-my-soma/Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:15:00 -0500https://blog.thomas-bray.com/posts/zoloft-as-my-soma/<h2 id="introduction">Introduction</h2> <p>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&rsquo;t change.</p> <h2 id="key-points">Key Points</h2> <ul> <li>The soma anxiety: fears about medication changing identity or dulling experience</li> <li>What SSRIs actually do at a functional level</li> <li>The difference between treating illness and altering personality</li> <li>Reflections on before and after: what changed and what stayed the same</li> <li>The stigma around psychiatric medication and why it persists</li> </ul> <h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2> <p>Zoloft didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;s the illness, not the treatment, that narrows your world.</p>