Hi, I’m Whitney. Welcome to docu-mental!
What is this?
docu-mental began in 2018 as a trusted weekly source of well-wrought analyses and podcast interviews on how expanding corporate power has tracked with our declining rates of mental wellness over the past 40 years. docu-mental has been recognized with two grants and while mental health was its focus, always ranked in the most-read mental health publications at Substack.
In 2024, the publication began taking a more personal tone, examining what frame of mind will stand us best in times of war and tumult, having already established a solid foundational understanding of how Capitalism and other systems actually constrain our creativity and liberties more than promote them.
Also in late 2024, All This Useless Beauty, a paid subsection in document-mental began publishing. Its focus is on observations missed by the media, the pundits, and anyone interested in shaping our thoughts for their own gain. A primary theme is land use, but how beauty, as in what creates awe, is defined and debased when it instead could be celebrated and generative is the overall point.
Podcast guests have ranged from New York Times bestselling-authors, to internationally recognized thought leaders in public health policy, economics, religion, psychedelics, and post-modern theory, as well as experts in mental health and psychiatry, corporate power, culture and the arts, and other relevant fields. Interviews were conducted through the lenses of personal experience and cultural analysis (and are all still available in the archives to paid subscribers).
Feel free to peruse the archives for deep thoughts on the nature of hierarchical thinking, the perils of monopolies, divorcing citizens from the land as a tool of subjugation, shame as a tool of empire, psychedelics as an end-run around Capitalism and empire, kindness as a tool of progress, the ideal v. reality of democracies, and many other philosophical and societal topics pertinent to living in america (little “a”).
docu-mental readers range from policymakers whose names you know, to powerful behind-the-scenes people you don’t, to everyday citizens who are tired of being told what to think but aren’t sure they have the agency to follow the threads of what’s beyond the bounds of acceptable, status quo conversation.
Who am I?
I’m Whitney McKnight, formerly a Washington, DC-based journalist, whose 30+ years of writing about healthcare antitrust law, federal health policy, clinical psychiatry, and other medical disciplines, helped me develop a deep and multi-faceted understanding of how the system itself is largely what undermines freedom and creates despair. With thousands of bylines, my work has appeared under scores of mastheads, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, Marketplace, Mergermarket, Christian Science Monitor, and virtually all of what are now Medscape titles, including Clinical Psychiatry News.
Late in 2022, I left Washington. A year of heavy things pushed me to take an odyssey across the nation and back, ending where I literally began: my birthplace in Central Kentucky where I now reside, happily, in beautiful Appalachia, and where I founded and publish an independent newspaper, The Edge (Reporting from THE EDGE of Appalachia in Berea, Kentucky.)
Thank you for your interest in my work.
Peace,
Whitney
