Can you tell the difference between antidepressants and Tolkien characters? Take the quiz!

I remember long ago Brunching Shuttlecocks had a regular quiz like this. Some great ones were “Cocktail or Elvis Movie?” and “My Little Pony or Porn Star?”

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Circa 1994 I rolled up a Drow Elf character for D&D and named him Xanax. Xanax Anaxa Naxan Axana to be precise. He was cool, if a bit of a pain to play, and he lasted for a long time. It being near the beginning of the public internet, dozens of xanax-related usenamed accounts have followed me through the decades. Still use it for games sometimes.

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That puts me to mind of Roseanne Roseannadanna.

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My favorite character is Tim Benzadrine.
https://www.abebooks.com/Bored-Rings-Parody-Tolkiens-Lord-Harvard/30627551262/bd?cm_mmc=ggl--US_Shopp_Trade--used-_-naa&gclid=CjwKCAjw5Ij2BRBdEiwA0Frc9VxsvZdIj6kZp7bBEjEtloKAIPd26hAFfqGzgk91xPnFThydI78SmRoC2qUQAvD_BwE

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18 of 24. Good quiz

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All the way through and then he misspells Answers, Doh.
Still it passed a few minutes before the next pill/ent.

Viagra is an antidepressant? Since when?

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Same. Guess I’ll take my Valinor now

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Yeah, a few of these were pretty questionable, like Viagra but also Eskalith (Lithium), which is NOT an antidepressant but rather a mood stabilizer used for Manic Depression (typically called bipolar these days but I guess it does technically have the word in there), but has a course of action very inappropriate in treating major depression.

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Oh lithium definitely has a place in treatment resistant major depression in certain subgroups, mostly to augment traditional antidepressants. Definitely what I’d called a specialist use though (I am such a specialist in training), and you’re not wrong that it would be inaccurate to refer to it as being in the drug class “antidepressant” CF mood stabiliser. Not to mention a bunch of these drugs are off the market in my country, and wouldn’t be surprised if other countries too. I think it’s easier to score well if you know Tolkien rather than pharmacology. I scored barely better than the rest of you and antidepressants are kinda my thang.

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Very interesting! I was prescribed a drug classed as a mood stabilizer for a while in my teens because I had epilepsy & a couple do both things, but I definitely didn’t need my mood stabilized. So I’m a little touchy about those drugs.

Very personal tangent: Later they put me on Dilantin, which is not classed as a mood stabilizer but can sort of work that way (if A Remarkable Medicine Has Been Overlooked is to be believed). I have such hate for that drug. Among other things it can cause you to lose your teeth. Not because they fall out but because your gums grow over them & you can no longer find them in your mouth.

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That must be why I got so many wrong! I was remembering Goodgulf and the rest and it was throwing me off.

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22/24. Am I the only one here who likes the Silmarillion … maybe more than LOTR? :expressionless:

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18/24. Those pesky Númenorians!

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I was hopeless at this quiz; but then I tried Science!

It turns out that dosing mice with Tolkien characters does not increase the duration of swim behaviors or delay the onset of immobile floating in mice under forced swim test conditions.

Even better, discovered possible class of novel Uruk-SSRIs that show theraputic promise if their innate tendency to chaotic evil can be remedied.

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I’d defer to @ringsundereyes on any details(unless his location of practice is totally different on this score); but in the US doctors are openly allowed to prescribe anything FDA approved off-label for anything their judgement suggests is a good idea(limited in practice by insurance companies refusing to pay, the DEA potentially sniffing around if the off-labels are scheduled, and by malpractice suits if the degree of creativity and experimentation gets too high); and a lot of psych meds have fairly limited, often fairly old, FDA approval for one thing or another and then a lot of less formal(often still written up in the literature and such, not just wild-ass guesses; but nobody feels like going back and funding another full scale clinical trial to get approval for a new indication) reports of possible efficiacy for other things.

Leads to off-label prescribing being more the rule than the exception in a fair few cases that don’t succumb more or less immediately to first line antidepressants. I know I’ve been throw a veritable zoo of the things, with all sorts of officially approved purposes that aren’t my problem, after the first-line stuff failed to perform as expected. It’s my layman’s understanding that there is zero commercial interest in going back and getting an already approved drug re-approved for something new(doubly so for the off-patent stuff) and the only real restriction is that you aren’t supposed to market the drug for something that it isn’t approved for, so you have a lot of psych medications that exist in an intermediate zone where their official uses are whatever seemed most viable to make an approval case for, sometimes years or decades ago, but some mixture of new research and clinical experience has carved out a (sometimes sizeable) chunk of additional possible uses that will never be rendered fully official; but are nevertheless routine.

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No, some parts of it I do too, but lineages…they just slide right out of my head. Tolkien, tye Iliad, the Old Testament, real world history, doesn’t matter. Honestly this was one of the things that made me sure I wanted to study physics instead of biology, one look at naming conventions in enzymes and genes and metabolic processes.

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I don’t think it is, though it’s primary effect was discovered by accident when sildenafil was being clinically tested as an angina medication.

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