Dan Dylan is the pen name of the first-time author of Chameleon.  He is a suburban Chicago native who attended Southern Illinois University, Carbondale where he completed his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Psychology. To fulfill a one-year, APA-approved clinical internship, he selected a state psychiatric hospital in Louisiana where he could be immersed in the milieu of both acute and chronic psychological disorders.  That one-year internship led to sixteen years of employment as a staff psychologist.  When the financial demands of a mortgage and impending fatherhood accompanied his Ph.D., he joined a part-time private practice to obtain the two years of supervision required for Louisiana licensure, and he was licensed in 1979.  In the years that followed, the private practice became a full-time commitment that has endured for more than thirty years.  In recent years, his professional interests and efforts have focused more narrowly on forensic psychology. 

For Dylan, the turn to writing was a long time coming because the demands of family and career caused delays at every turn.  However, he was driven by his daily involvement with neglected and abused children, their abusive parents, troubled adults, and criminal offenders, which forced him to recognize that the cycle of abuse is not just a textbook construct or a teaching tool.  Abuse grabs headlines and occurs every minute of every day; neglect and abuse have consequences that impact us all.  In the absence of treatment, some abused children can—and do—become abusive adults; they are at greater risk and have the potential to become criminals or non-productive members of our society who can drain resources rather than contribute to their communities.  In the extreme, adult survivors of abuse may perpetuate the trauma of their own childhood experiences.  Treatments available to abuse victims, both children and adults, typically occur within medical, mental health, and criminal justice systems that are overwhelmed, always hamstrung by regulations and inadequate funding, and peopled by providers who have, in many cases, given their all, without seeing measureable improvements.  

Through his writing of fiction, Dan Dylan seeks to portray the increasingly influential role of his profession and to foster an understanding of psychology’s contribution to one of the most pressing concerns of our society.  By exploring child neglect and abuse and its ramifications for individuals, families, and society at all levels, he hopes to give his readers a small slice of one psychologist’s perspective.  Immersed in the day-to-day of private practice, it was his sudden insight that his own professional reality, turned upside down, could become fiction, and he has been able to use that awareness to drive him, despite the obstacles, to a completion of Chameleon. 

With the publication of Chameleon, Dylan will follow the lead of his alter-ego, John Foster, and relax into semi-retirement in Orange Beach, AL so he can write while overlooking Perdido Pass and the blue-green waters of the resilient Gulf of Mexico.  His second novel, Duty to Warn, is in progress and will continue John Foster’s career.  A third novel, set in a fictional state psychiatric hospital, will capture the comedy that was Dylan’s clinical psychology internship.