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univ-lyon1.fr Mortality rate is high in psychiatric patients versus general population. An important cause of this increased mortality is sudden cardiac death (SCD) as a major side-effect of psy-chotropic drugs. These SCDs generally result from arrhythmias occurring when the posol-ogy is high and may attain a toxic threshold but also at dosages within therapeutic range, in the presence of risk factors.There are three kinds of risk factors: physiological (e.g., low cardiac rate of sportsmen), physiopathological (e.g., hepatic insufficiency, hypothyroidism) and “therapeutic ” (due to interactions between psychotropic drugs and other medicines). Association of pharmacological agents may increase the likelihood of SCDs either by (i) a pharmacokinetic mechanism (e.g., increased torsadogenic potential of a psychotropic drug when its destruction and/or elimination are compromised) or (ii) a pharmacodynamical mechanism (e.g., mutual potentiation of proarrhythmic properties of two drugs). In addi-tion, some psychotropic drugsmay induce sudden death in cases of pre-existing congenital cardiopathies such as (i) congenital long QT syndrome, predisposing to torsade de pointe