PTSD
A new study reports that regular practice of Vedic Meditation or Transcendental Meditation (TM) enables some active duty service members battling post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to reduce, or even eliminate, their use of psychotropic medications and to better control the often-debilitating symptoms of PTSD.
Transcendental Meditation is a specific type of focused meditation that takes practitioners from a state of noisy thinking to a state of inner quietness. Practicing TM reduces stress hormones by activating the "tend-and-befriend" or "rest-and-digest" functions of the parasympathetic nervous system, while calming the sympathetic nervous system, which stimulates the "fight-or-flight" response.
The January 2016 study, “Impact of Transcendental Meditation on Psychotropic Medication Use Among Active Duty Military Service Members With Anxiety and PTSD,” was published in the journal Military Medicine.
This study included 74 active-duty service members with PTSD or anxiety disorder. Many of the participants had experienced multiple deployments in recent years and were seeking treatment for PTSD at Dwight David Eisenhower Army Medical Center's Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic at Fort Gordon, Georgia.
For this study, half of the service members voluntarily practiced Transcendental Meditation regularly in addition to their other therapy; the other half did not. After one month, 83.7% of the meditators had stabilized and reduced, or stopped their use of psychotropic drugs to treat their PTSD conditions. Only 10.9% had increased their medication dosages.
On the flip side, of those who didn’t meditate, only 59.4% had stabilized and reduced, or stopped, taking psychotropic drugs for PTSD. Unfortunately, 40.5% of participants who weren't meditating actually began taking higher dosages of medication. Similar percentages were found in the following months and in a six-month follow up.