When Brandon Jones, PhD, LMHC, commits himself to something, he goes all in. No matter the context—as an athlete, a mental health counselor, or scholar—he pushes himself, his team, and his clients beyond personal and systemic boundaries. On the basketball court, this led him to play professionally in Cottbus, Germany after graduating from Amherst College. When an illness cut short his career in basketball, he pivoted to mental health counseling with his characteristic determination.
Brandon went back home to focus on his community, landing a job as a case manager with the Mental Health Association of Essex County in New Jersey. There, he connected adults who had been living in long-term psychiatric hospitals to resources and support services once they’d been discharged.
“I was doing this work in an urban, mostly poor community in New Jersey that I grew up in. I loved helping people gain stability in their lives as they transitioned to the community. But at the same time, my clients were asking me to be helpful in ways that I wasn’t equipped,” says Brandon. He enrolled in Lesley’s master’s degree program in Clinical Mental Health Counseling: Trauma Studies. The intensive clinical training, and courses exploring the role of power and privilege in the clinical relationship and society, gave him the framework and tools for his newfound counseling career.
“Working in communities comprised of mostly people of color who are from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, issues of power and privilege came up all of the time. And recognizing that, it helped me to intervene in ways so that I wasn’t perpetuating oppressive systems,” he explains.
After graduating in 2014, Brandon worked as a clinician for human services and advocacy organizations for several years. Being “neck-deep” in the day-to-day, though, he felt he couldn’t change the bigger, systemic factors that were influencing his work and his clients. “I realized that if I was committed to equity and justice, I had to impact the broader structure and systems in which we deliver care,” he says.
This realization led him to Lesley’s doctoral program in Counseling Psychology with its emphasis on transforming leadership, education, and research in the field. Brandon appreciated being part of a community that encouraged students to explore their own identities and worldviews, and others’ perspectives. His fellow doctoral students challenged each other to grow in their efficacy as agents of change.
Brandon Jones '20 in a doctoral class. Brandon got his PhD in Counseling Psychology: Transformative Leadership, Education, and Applied Research.
Transforming the Field Through Grassroots Work and Research
As a PhD candidate, Brandon gained new insight and access to aspects of the mental health system. He found opportunities to influence the people in power working at community-based agencies who could make significant changes in policies. And he consulted with stakeholders on innovative ways of offering care.
In one class project, he collaborated with a long-term residential facility that served youth. There, he proposed an improved model for how the organization could orient its clients—many of whom had been displaced from their home community—to resources and supports in their new geographic area.
This theme of transformation continued through his clinical work and his dissertation, "Counseling while Black: A critical inquiry exploring the experiences of Black Master’s level counselors in predominantly White, mental health settings.” The idea for this research topic grew out of an unrelated class project in which Brandon noticed a scarcity of literature on the experiences of Black counselors.
“There’s a big push in applied therapy and professional counseling spaces around diversity. Our field does not represent the communities we work with, and that’s a problem,” he says.
But while professional organizations have committed to improving diversity and retention of counseling students and faculty, the experiences of Black counselors have largely been left out of this conversation.
Brandon set out to address this gap.
His doctoral research examined the experiences of self-identified Black counselors in predominantly white and non-academic mental health settings. He explored the barriers related to race and gender that Black counselors face, and how they respond to, cope with, and overcome these challenges. He learned that for Black counselors, there is often a tension between wanting to resist white supremacy and patriarchy, and wanting to develop close relationships with their colleagues. His research gave a voice to clinicians who are doing the work on the ground, and these voices add to the body of literature and change how the field views and approaches multiculturalism.
Brandon hopes his work helps to normalize, through institutions and policies, a wider understanding of marginalized counselors’ experiences in the service of bringing about justice and equity.