Transcendental meditation · San Diego · CAPS sheet

A silent sit skipped the replay.

JM Thomas · 18 August 2026

Twelve weeks of sitting with a silent sound, no trauma retelling, moved CAPS as far as the hour that makes you say the memory out loud to a scorer still holding the same interview sheet. They sat with an internal sound in a quiet chair, like a radio left on in another room. That exposure hour still wanted the whole verbal replay. Ten points on the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale was the cutoff the investigators scored. That is a clinical shift, not a caption that says someone cured trauma in twelve minutes. An AP writeup on NBC from 16 November 2018 pointed at intrusive nightmares and wrecked sleep as the line items on that sheet. Stick to the ten-point bar. Do not invent a group mean Table 2 never printed, and do not round a 61 percent response into a guarantee. The CAPS interviewers did not know which chair the veteran used. The delta reads like a hardware clock. Not a fan's afterglow.

The trial ran at the Department of Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System. They screened 814 veterans and randomized 203 between 10 June 2013 and 7 October 2016. Sixty-eight veterans sat in TM. Prolonged exposure got the same headcount. Baseline CAPS sat at 79.7, spread 17.8. Mean age was 47. One hundred twenty-eight veterans, 68 percent, were already on psychiatric medication. Heavy load. The 2025 economics paper said 83 percent of the cohort were men. Each assigned chair asked for 12 sessions across 12 weeks plus daily home practice. TM ran mostly in groups. Exposure was one-on-one, which hands that arm more raw clinical attention if you wanted matched rooms. NBC said 90 minutes a week. Groessl and Rutledge, writing in 2025, said TM used one 90-minute orientation then eleven 60-minute sits, while exposure ran twelve 90-minute individual appointments. TM used an assigned sound, eyes closed, in a normal chair, and skipped the narration. Certified Maharishi teachers led it. Several co-authors held posts at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield. Thomas Rutledge, the VA psychologist who ran the site, told the AP he does not meditate. The replay protocol was not required to drop the score.

On the 10-point non-inferiority margin, TM held against prolonged exposure. Mean change difference -5.9, 95 percent CI -14.3 to 2.4, p=0.0002. Sixty-one percent of the TM cohort crossed that 10-point win. Exposure landed at 42 percent. CAPS effect sizes for TM sat between 0.90 and 1.2. Exposure's spread sat lower, 0.63 to 0.89. Clean hardware, no memory dump. Veterans quit the replay hour a lot. Reliving it is sandpaper on a raw nerve. The 2025 cost paper said fewer than 8 of 12 sessions sat at 25 percent for TM and 38 percent for exposure. That gap was not statistically significant. The friction is still famous. Rutledge said many patients refuse exposure or leave early because the toll is ugly, and that a verified alternative lets a clinician put another option on the table. Paula Schnurr, executive director of the VA National Center for PTSD, named the holes: no follow-up past three months, and one clinician delivered 80 percent of the exposure hours. That exposure number wears one person's style. The 61 percent figure is an immediate post-treatment snapshot under NCT01865123 and DoD awards W81XWH-12-1-0576 and W81XWH-12-1-0577. A phone app is a different machine than this 203-person protocol.

Health education is the leftover San Diego chair, and it belongs in its own paragraph. Sixty-seven veterans sat there. They got diet and exercise modules. It moved least. TM beat that packet by -14.6 CAPS points, CI -23.3 to -5.9, p=0.0009, on the same blinded interview the investigators used after twelve weeks in that leftover San Diego chair. Exposure beat it by -8.7, CI -17.0 to -0.32, p=0.041. About 32 percent of the packet group crossed the 10-point bar. Control effect sizes sat in the 0.14 to 0.34 range.

A later health-economics paper used the same 203 people. New spreadsheet. Same bodies. Groessl and Rutledge, PLOS ONE, 6 February 2025, put direct provider cost plus overhead at 1,504 dollars for TM and 2,822 dollars for prolonged exposure. A five-year utilization projection put TM at 42,982 dollars. Exposure landed at 46,730. The leftover chair, health class, cost 492 dollars to deliver. Its five-year projection sat near 45,679. Groessl disclosed consulting pay from the David Lynch Foundation. Keep that on the page. This is an admin projection, not a new trial. The 10-point CAPS shift is still the metric that matters.

A 2026 European paper looked at sixty days in displaced civilians. Different map. No exposure arm. Didukh, Freitag, Lunov, Maksymenko, and Rudenko published in Clinical and Preventive Medicine (2026, issue 2, pages 52-65) on 80 Ukrainian refugees in Germany. Forty sat in TM for 60 days. Forty sat inactive. PCL-5 at the start was the first clock. Day 30 reprinted that same sheet. By day 30 the TM group dropped 18.53 PCL-5 points, 95 percent CI 25.77 to 11.28, p under 0.001. People over the diagnostic line of 31 fell from 60.0 percent to 2.5 percent. IES-R dropped 16.12, CI 22.65 to 9.60. BDI-II dropped 7.56. Day 60 came later. Zero people in the TM group still met the PTSD cutoff then. The inactive group did not show a trauma drop, and their depression scores drifted up. Do not weld this recovery line to San Diego. NCT05645042, TM versus present-centered therapy, and NCT06695156, a single-arm migraine registry updated July 2026, have not released peer-reviewed numbers on this page.

For a physical vagal reset you can run without a subscription, Protocol 01 is the seven-minute stack. The Library holds the rest of the mechanism notes.

San Diego 2013-2016 CAPS file