ABOUT OUR FOUNDER

Michael Trout completed both his undergraduate studies in philosophy and his graduate studies in psychology in Michigan. He completed his specialized training in infant psychiatry at the Child Development Project, University of Michigan School of Medicine, under Prof. Selma Fraiberg. In the mental health field since 1968, and in private practice since 1979, Mr. Trout was the founding president of the Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health and the International Association for Infant Mental Health, served a term as president of the Illinois Association for Infant Mental Health, was on the charter Editorial Board of the Infant Mental Health Journal, served as Vice-President for the United States for the World Association for Infant Mental Health, and served on the Professional Advisory Council, the Board of Directors and as Editor of the Newsletter for APPPAH–the international society for prenatal and perinatal psychology. Mr. Trout won the Selma Fraiberg Award for “...significant contributions to the needs of infants and their families”, and Lifetime Achievement awards by ATTACh and by the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health).

ABOUT THE CLINICAL DIVISION

The Infant-Parent Institute has specialized in clinical services, professional training and research related to the optimal development of infants and their families since 1986. Michael Trout, founder and director of the Institute, is a graduate of the Infant Mental Health Training Program at the University of Michigan, under Professor Selma Fraiberg.

The Institute became known for our psychoanalytically-informed, dyadic (infant-parent) psychotherapy practice, as well as our efforts with the foster care and adoption systems; conducting divorce mediation involving young children; treating adults whose depression, marital problems or parenting struggles have arisen out of conflicted experiences in the first few years of life; and offering parent support and guidance groups. With the closing of the clinical practice of the Institute at the end of 2014, those services are no longer available at the Institute.

For 25 years, the Institute offered on-site training through the week-long Clinical Course in Infant Mental Health, and year-long Clinical Traineeships. Several thousand terminal-degree clinicians, academics and administrators from around the world participated. The week-long course was also offered around North America, usually at clinic sites, and continued through the COVID era, via zoom, in Ireland, the UK, and around the US.

Our training efforts extended to the creation of 14 training videos, tackling areas as diverse as domestic violence, a family’s reaction to the birth of a sick or disabled child, the child’s experience of divorce, and what it may mean to a baby to live with parental incarceration. Other productions included a meditation CD for foster and adoptive parents, and another for physicians and nurses. In addition to a few dozen book chapters and journal articles, Mr. Trout wrote Baby Verses: The Narrative Poetry of Infants and Toddlers; The Jonathon Letters: One Family’s Use of Support as They Took in, and Fell in Love With, a Troubled Child (co-authored with Lori Thomas, a foster/adopt mom); and the medical textbook, See me as a Person: Creating Therapeutic Relationships with Patients and Their Families (co-authored with Mary Koloroutis). His final book is Four Decades in Infant Mental Health: This Hallowed Ground, a casebook published by Cambridge Scholars in 2021.

Services

The Infant-Parent Institute was always best known for our clinical work with infants and their families.

Our services included:

Supporting families in crisis as well as families who were working with long-term developmental or clinical problems with their growing children.
Providing psychotherapy to families for whom the process of attachment with their baby had been difficult.
Supporting pregnant women to pull closer to their unborn babies during pregnancy, and to prepare for delivery.
Assessing babies and toddlers for problems ranging from feeding and sleeping disruptions to affective and growth problems.
Providing training and consultation to those serving children in various capacities: Child Care Center and family providers, educators, parents, mentors & volunteers.
Parent support and guidance groups and individual parent coaching.
Helping families who were divorcing, who were part of the foster care system, who were adopting or who were otherwise struggling to make decisions that were in the best interests of their children.

Our interest in attachment and early social experience also led us into psychotherapeutic work with older children and grownups. It was not uncommon for us to help a forty-year-old adoptee understand newly-discovered depression rooted in early life experiences, or to counsel a new college student trying to understand why separation from home catapulted her into unexpected sorrow or rage.

For Families Expecting a Baby

Prenatal Bonding (BA) was developed in Hungary in the 1990’s as a method to support the connection between mother and unborn child. After research with 2,000 mothers in Hungary and Germany, it appears that this intervention substantially reduces the frequency and severity of perinatal depression, results in far-fewer premature deliveries and c-section deliveries, reduces the incidence of birth trauma and reduces the frequency and duration of infant crying in the first year after birth.

Michael Trout, Director of The Infant-Parent Institute, initiated the introduction of Prenatal Bonding (BA) to the United States by inviting Gerhard Schroth, MD, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst from Speyer, Germany, to train 14 specialists from around the nation in this new model of supportive intervention. Several clinicians from Illinois (including Mr. Trout) were part of this national training program.

Films, Books, and Meditation CDs

The entire library of still-active films, books and meditation CDs have been donated to Chaddock's Training and Professional Development Services. To order, please visit www.chaddockstore.org.

This Hallowed Ground: Four Decades in Infant Mental Health audiobook was donated to the Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health and is available exclusively from www.mi-aimh.org. Print versions can be found at www.cambridgescholars.com.