Did I Hear That Right?

I forgot about this. I meant to post about it the other night. I was watching Law and Order (too bad Dr. Deb is on vacation, even though it wasn't SVU--I could have ran over to her blog for a quickie on the topic.) Anyway, I wasn't really paying attention. There was too much going on in the house and it was late...anyway, my ears pricked up when I heard that a character died while overdosing on Depaquel(sp?). Huh? They said it was an antipsychotic. And just to be sure that I wasn't hallucinating, they repeated the drug name three times during the episode.

Okay. Now I know that certain drugs can be sold around the world under various generic names but Seroquel is fairly new and I don't know if the patent has run out yet for other companies to start producing it under another name other than the generic Quetiapine. So I was thinking, is this some new hybrid between either Depakote or Depakene and Seroquel? Why anyone would want to do that is beyond me. And you thought Zyprexa would pack on the pounds HA! And speaking of Zyprexa (aka Olanzapine,) it's the only antipsychotic that I know of that has been souped up with another med, an SSRI--Prozac (aka Fluoxetine.) That is Symbyax and I'm sure that was years in the making.

I have yet to hear of any plans to combine anticonvulsants with antipsychotics. To me, it doesn't make any sense. Granted, I'm no psychopharmocologist but anticonvulsants are too hit and miss. And although they may be considered mood stabilizers, technically they are not. They only true mood stabilizer as a class of drug is Lithium. The whole point of Symbyax was to assist with the depressive aspects of bipolar. So far in clinical trials (if memory serves,) the best drug in the anticonvulsant class (and what I've heard anecdotally--see, anticonvulsants are a crap shoot when it comes to treating the depression side of bipolar!) is Lamictal. So maybe the drug in the television show should have been called Lamiquel?

That got me thinking, maybe my spelling was off. Maybe it was Depoquel! That got me going down a whole different pathway. Maybe it was a combination of Depo-Provera (birth control) and Seroquel! Now this makes sense (and the victim of death was female...) This just might be marketable. Sometimes those manic episodes do lead to some pretty bad decisions... Hey, with the *new* "Depoquel" you certainly won't have to worry about racing to get the "Morning After Pill!"

Now I googled every spelling variable possible and I can't find anything. If someone in some country somewhere takes this version of an antipsychotic, please let me know. Nothing makes me angrier than misinformation in the media. I don't know if there was some sort of copyright thing going on but if so, then they could have resorted to good old Haldol/Halperidol and leave it at that.