Psychiatrists serving the 205 000 low income people covered by the Medicaid program in Washington, DC, disproportionately benefited from gifts and payments from pharmaceutical companies, compared with other local physicians, a study shows.

In addition, children covered by Medicaid, a principal focus of the program, were twice as likely as all Americans to be prescribed antipsychotic drugs. About one child in 10 was prescribed that class of drugs.

Those two associations were gleaned from an analysis of marketing data that pharmaceutical companies reported to the government of the District of Columbia under the AccessRx Act, which was passed in …