Summary Of Decentralization Efforts By Paul Smoke

In Paul Smoke’s article, which analyzes the use of subnational revenue for decentralization efforts, he claims that generating subnational revenue often fails even when normative instruction has been followed. In an attempt to shed light to this oddity, he posses the question, “are the principles inappropriate, or are they just poorly applied?” He later goes on to demonstrate how both elements hinder decentralization efforts (Smoke 2013). This notion of principle versus practice echoes an issue psychiatry faces as an instrument for social control. While theoretically, using psychiatry to implement order and structure positively impacts society’s wellbeing, it is apparent in practice that this notion is naïve and unrealistic. As a result, social control seems to mostly function as a hindrance to
While this label did include mentally ill patients, other imprisoned deviants included vagabonds, the poor, criminals, and the unemployed. Also important is to note that this undertaking occurred in conjunction with a change in attitude towards idleness and moral obligation. Society believed that forcing “deviants” to partake in manual labor could figuratively mold them back into healthy and productive members of society. This approach did help re-integrate certain patients back into society; mainly the poor and the criminals that lacked adequate professional skills to thrive as productive members of society. It did absolutely nothing, however, to the patients that truly experienced mental illness. In creating an over encompassing label and refusing to address the medical symptoms experienced by the mentally sick, 17th century society inadvertently used autocratic control to hinder therapy. Although there were clearly ulterior motives, this offbeat approach to therapy seems like it could theoretically be helpful. In practice, however, the results proved