ABSTRACT
The treatment approach described here has gradually shaped over a 20-year period and moved from case studies to a completed clinical trial (Linden et al., 2001) and further ongoing controlled intervention trials. This chapter therefore represents a very personal account of this development process and its contents are not claimed to represent an “industry standard”. Guidance in the development of this approach has come from the early writing of Meyer and Liddell (1975) and Meyer and Turkat (1979) on case formulation in behaviour therapy at large, and from periodic reviews of the literature on etiology and on the treatment of hypertension in particular (Linden, 1984, 1988, Linden & Chambers, 1994; McGrady & Linden, 2003). For the purpose of this chapter, I will refer to the case formulation approach described here as the Hypertension Individually-tailored Treatment approach (acronym HIT).
