Meet Jerusalem Brown of Mental Health Monarchs ®

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jerusalem Brown.

Hi Jerusalem, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Art and music were literally my first loves. When I was younger, I imagined myself doing something creative professionally, but I simply couldn’t find a viable path into either field at the time. I am fascinated by human behavior, so I chose psychology instead, and somewhere along the way I discovered another kind of work that felt deeply meaningful to me: helping people understand themselves, reclaim their voice, trust what they know, and make choices that belong to them.

I eventually became a licensed psychotherapist and have worked in mental health in several capacities over the years. I’ve also served as an adjunct psychology instructor, which gave me another way to engage in the field-not only through clinical work, but through teaching people how to think about behavior, emotion, relationships, and the experiences that shape us.

I founded Mental Health Monarchs (MHM) in 2019, and the heart of the work has become increasingly clear to me over time. MHM exists to help people become liberated leaders of their lives. That means building self-awareness, emotional self-mastery, boundaries, self-trust, and inner authority to stop living from old wounds, inherited expectations, fear, or someone else’s notions about who they should be. The work is about owning the right to choose yourself, define yourself, and lead your life from a place that belongs to you.

What I didn’t expect when I entered psychology was that Mental Health Monarchs would eventually return me to my first loves. Creative direction has given me a way to use art, visual storytelling, music, fashion, writing, and design alongside psychology. I get to take psychological ideas that might otherwise live in a textbook, therapy office, or clinical conversation and translate them into things people can see, feel, wear, read, laugh at, sit with, or return to later. That part of the work feels very natural to me because creativity was never something I stopped loving. I just found another doorway back to it.

Today, Mental Health Monarchs sits at the intersection of psychology, Black culture, creativity, and emotional liberation. I still practice as a psychotherapist, but MHM has grown into something larger than clinical work alone. It has become the place where my professional training, creative instincts, and passion for Black mental wellness can exist together instead of forcing me to choose between them.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I wouldn’t describe the road as completely smooth, but I also wouldn’t call it rocky. A lot of the challenges have come from growing and learning myself, learning business, and giving Mental Health Monarchs permission to become something different from what I originally imagined.

When I first created MHM, the focus was much more specific. I wanted to center the experiences of adult children of mentally ill parents, which is still work that matters deeply to me. But over time, the vision expanded. I began seeing more clearly that the larger thread running through my work was liberation: helping people understand what shaped them without allowing those experiences to keep deciding who they get to become. MHM has continued to evolve around that.

Some of the more practical growing pains have been creative ones. I’ve designed versions of the website that I was excited about, only to outgrow them shortly after publishing because my visual language had already shifted. I’ve had ideas in my head that I couldn’t quite execute because the technology wouldn’t cooperate. Wix and I have had a few conversations over the years. It has gotten much better, though.

But I’ve actually enjoyed the learning curve. Every version has taught me something about what belongs, what doesn’t, what feels like MHM, and what I was only trying on for size. I’m still learning, still refining, and still changing my mind when the work asks me to. I think one of the most important things I’ve learned about building something of my own is that evolution doesn’t mean the original vision was wrong. Sometimes it means you finally understand it well enough to let it grow.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Mental Health Monarchs is a Black-centered mental wellness brand and psychotherapy practice built around one central idea: helping people become liberated leaders of their lives. My clinical work focuses heavily on self-trust, boundaries, emotional self-mastery, childhood and family experiences, people-pleasing, emotional neglect, and the ways we can unknowingly keep organizing our adult lives around old wounds or inherited expectations. The goal is not simply to understand what happened to you. At some point, the work must be about what you want to do with your life now.
What makes MHM different is that I don’t believe psychology has to be stripped of culture, personality, beauty, humor, or creativity to be credible. Mental wellness is lived in real life-in our families, friendships, faith, music, language, bodies, homes, work, and the stories we have inherited about who we are supposed to be. So, I wanted MHM to feel like a place where all of that could come into the room.

That is also why the imagery throughout Mental Health Monarchs is intentionally Black. Representation is not an afterthought in this work. I want Black people to encounter psychological ideas and see ourselves reflected with beauty, complexity, softness, power, humor, style, contradiction, and imagination. We are so often represented through struggle that I wanted to create imagery that also gives us permission to see ourselves as expansive. Sometimes that means a Black woman sitting in therapy. Sometimes it means a Black Madonna wearing encrusted jewels and a crown. Sometimes it means fashion, ancestral imagery, a palace, a grand dining table, or something playful enough to make you laugh before you realize you just learned something about yourself.

The creative side of MHM gives me room to translate psychology beyond the therapy office. The Scriptorium, our editorial blog, explores mental health, relationships, family dynamics, culture, grief, boundaries, identity, and emotional liberation through long-form writing and visual storytelling. Crown Quips take psychological truths and give them a little more personality. The MHM boutique extends those ideas into journals, reflective tools, apparel, stationery, and other pieces people can bring into their everyday lives. Reflective tools offer a private place to engage with the work, while apparel lets an idea like Black Mental Wellness Matters leave the screen and move through the world on someone’s body.

I’ve also enjoyed creating spaces within the MHM world, like the Parlor and Banquet Hall, because they let me play with the idea of psychological concepts having an atmosphere. I find myself asking, what would this idea feel like if you could walk into it? What would it look like, sound like, wear, or sit beside? That kind of creative translation is one of my favorite parts of the work.

I think that is what I am most proud of about MHM: it has developed its own language without losing the substance underneath it. Reflect. Reclaim. Reign. is not simply branding for me. Reflection is where we begin to understand ourselves. Reclamation is where we decide what belongs to us and what never did. Reigning is what happens when that understanding begins to change the way we actually live.

I want people to know that Mental Health Monarchs is not asking them to become some perfected, endlessly healed version of themselves. I’m much more interested in people becoming deeply acquainted with who they are, developing enough self-trust to hear themselves clearly, and recognizing that they have the right to author their own lives. Therapy is one doorway into that work. Writing can be another. Art can be another. Sometimes even a T-shirt can start a conversation. MHM gives me the freedom to use all of them.

Do you have any advice for those just starting out?
The biggest thing I would tell someone who is just starting out is to give yourself permission to begin before you have the entire vision figured out. When I started Mental Health Monarchs, I had a much narrower idea of what it would become. If I had treated that first version like a contract I could never revise, I would have missed so much of what MHM eventually grew into.

I also wish I had understood sooner that changing your mind isn’t the same as being inconsistent. Sometimes you learn more. Sometimes your taste develops. Sometimes your audience teaches you something. Sometimes you build the thing you thought you wanted and realize, once you can finally see it in front of you, that it no longer fits. That is not necessarily failure.

I would also tell people not to become so preoccupied with looking “professional” that they sand all of themselves out of the work. Professional does not have to mean generic. Some of the strongest parts of MHM came from allowing more of my own interests, humor, cultural perspective, creative instincts, and visual language into the brand instead of trying to make it look like what I thought a mental health business was “supposed” to look like.

And finally, learn enough about the backend business side to protect the creative side. Vision matters, but so do systems, contracts, finances, intellectual property, technology, and laying the foundation of what you are building. Creativity gets a lot more freedom when the structure underneath it can hold the weight.

If I could go back and tell the version of me who started MHM one thing, it would probably be this: build the version you can see now, but leave room for the version you haven’t met yet. You do NOT have to know exactly what the work will become to begin becoming the person capable of creating it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mentalhealthmonarchs.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mental_health_monarchs
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mentalhealthmonarchs
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mental-health-monarchs/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@mentalhealthmonarchs