The research team, led by Nick Pietsch, Naomi Baes, and Nick Haslam of the University of Melbourne, applied a framework known as SIBling, which measures semantic change along three dimensions: Sentiment, Intensity, and Breadth. Sentiment captures the average valence of words appearing near the target term, Intensity captures their average emotional arousal, and Breadth captures the diversity of semantic contexts in which the term is used. The approach builds on a body of work showing that harm-related concepts such as trauma, addiction, and mental health have broadened their meanings over recent decades, encompassing less severe phenomena and more varied situations. Whether a diagnostic label like ADHD follows the same trajectory had not previously been tested at scale.

The corpus was drawn from the U.S. Newsstream Collection, a ProQuest database of more than one billion documents from over 1,300 sources. Articles were selected if they contained ADHD, A.D.H.D., attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or attention deficit disorder in their body text, then de-duplicated using a shingling and Jaccard similarity procedure with a threshold of 0.6. The final corpus contained 63,963 articles, from which 103,532 clean sentences containing the target term were extracted, spanning 191 publishers. Coverage grew dramatically over the study period, from just 47 articles from 11 publishers in 1990 to 2,334 articles in 2023, with newspapers and wire feeds making up more than 90 percent of the material.

To measure Breadth, the researchers sampled 50 ADHD-containing sentences per year, embedded each one using XL-LEXEME, a target-aware sentence embedding model fine-tuned to distinguish whether a word expresses the same or different senses across sentence pairs, and computed the average pairwise cosine distance between embeddings. Higher distances indicate that the term appears in more heterogeneous contexts. The result was a statistically reliable upward trend, equivalent to roughly an 8 percent increase in Breadth across the 36-year window. Crucially, when the team modeled whether rising salience, indexed by the growing proportion of articles mentioning ADHD, predicted subsequent semantic change using autoregressive distributed lag models, only Breadth showed a significant lagged effect of salience. In other words, the more the media talked about ADHD, the more loosely and variously the term was used in the years that followed.

The Sentiment and Intensity results were more surprising. The researchers expected that growing familiarity with ADHD, the normalization of diagnosis and treatment, and the rise of neurodiversity discourse would make coverage more positive and less emotionally charged. Instead, the average valence of words within five lemmas of ADHD declined by about 0.34 points on a nine-point scale, a modest but highly reliable drop, while average arousal rose by about 0.07 points. Both trends survived extensive sensitivity checks: they held when the context window was widened to the full sentence, when an alternative affective lexicon, the NRC Valence, Arousal, and Dominance Lexicon, was substituted for the Warriner norms, and when the partial year 2025 was excluded from the analysis.

A corpus-level benchmark helped clarify what these trends mean. The researchers randomly sampled 1,000 articles per year from the broader database and computed their average valence and arousal. General news language showed no long-term decline in valence, meaning that the negative drift around ADHD was specific to the condition rather than a secular shift toward gloomier journalism. The rise in arousal, by contrast, did not significantly exceed the corpus-wide increase, suggesting that ADHD coverage became more emotionally intense largely in step with news language generally, though a late reversal in the ADHD arousal trajectory after 2023 was distinctive.

What drove the drift toward darker associations? A contribution analysis of the words neighboring ADHD pointed to two complementary changes. Positively valenced childhood terms, especially child and parent, became steadily less frequent, while negatively valenced clinical and mental health terms, including autism, anxiety, depression, medication, and symptom, became more common. The ten largest trend-consistent contributions accounted for roughly 37 percent of the valence decline. The pattern suggests that news coverage has shifted from framing ADHD as a childhood behavioral concern toward framing it as one node in a wider web of psychiatric conditions, a shift that both broadens the concept and subtly problematizes it. The rise in arousal was more diffuse, reflecting both the disappearance of low-arousal filler words and the arrival of higher-arousal terms such as depression, bipolar, risk, and disorder.

The study also detected a striking nonlinear turn in the late 2010s. Sentiment, which had declined since 1990, began rising after its low point in 2018, and Intensity began falling after its peak in 2019. The researchers offer three speculative explanations that coincide with this inflection: the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought a surge of media attention to ADHD that may have been more sympathetic than earlier coverage; the international explosion of TikTok in 2018, a platform now notorious for both ADHD awareness content and misinformation; and the mainstreaming of neurodiversity discourse, which reframes ADHD in terms of strengths like hyperfocus and creativity. A parallel study of British newspaper coverage of autism found a similar shift from deficit-focused to diversity-focused language around 2018, lending plausibility to the third explanation, though the authors caution that disentangling these influences awaits further work.

The implications extend beyond lexicography. Because news media are a major vehicle of cultural transmission, shifts in how ADHD is represented plausibly shape public attitudes and behavior. Research by Tse and Haslam has shown that people who hold broader concepts of mental disorder self-diagnose at higher rates, at lower levels of distress, and seek treatment more often, while other work suggests broad definitions lead people to judge others as less likely to recover. Rising awareness itself has been theorized to fuel a prevalence inflation, in which mild distress is overinterpreted as illness. Against that backdrop, the finding that ADHD has expanded its semantic range precisely as its media salience soared, and that coverage has grown somewhat more critical in tone, offers a quantitative thread connecting diagnostic expansion, cultural attention, and the well-documented rise in self-diagnosis and treatment-seeking.

The authors are careful about limits. The trends, though statistically robust, are modest in absolute magnitude, and the lexicon-based measures capture local lexical associations rather than the overall tone of complete articles. The corpus is restricted to US media, early-year coverage was thinner, and some articles using the unpunctuated abbreviation ADD may have been missed. Still, the scale of the analysis, more than 60,000 articles over 36 years, dwarfs previous media studies of psychiatric language, and its demonstration that a diagnostic concept can creep in public discourse opens a new window on how mental health categories live and grow outside the clinic. Whether the recent softening of sentiment and intensity marks a durable turn toward normalization, or merely a pause in a longer drift toward problematization, is now one of the most consequential questions the trend lines pose.

Subject of Research: Historical semantic change in US news media representations of ADHD

Article Title: Shifting focus: Changing representations of ADHD in US news media

Article References: Pietsch, N., Baes, N., & Haslam, N. (2026). Shifting focus: Changing representations of ADHD in US news media. SSM – Mental Health, 10, Article 100710. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2026.100710

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.ssmmh.2026.100710

Keywords: ADHD, concept creep, semantic change, news media, natural language processing, word embeddings, sentiment analysis, mental health, diagnostic inflation, neurodiversity, corpus linguistics, SSM Mental Health

At the heart of WARP lies the Sāmoan concept of vā, a relational epistemology describing the sacred space that exists between people, and teu le vā, the practice of nurturing that space. Teu le vā is embedded in fa’asamoa, the Sāmoan way of life, and is traditionally recognized through how relationships are tended: how people speak to one another, how food is distributed, how seating arrangements and acts of care are organized in relation to self, family, village and chief. Its foundations rest on responsibility to practice respect, reciprocity, love, inclusion, understanding, thoughtfulness, service and compassion in everyday life. The researchers argue that this worldview, far from being a cultural curiosity, is a form of Indigenous technology that educators can deploy to build genuine, healthy relationships with NH/PI students, and that relational wellbeing is the precondition for academic success, mental health and holistic wellness across the life course.

The urgency behind the framework is grounded in stark evidence. NH/PI communities are among the fastest growing in Washington state and include some of the largest Tongan, Native Hawaiian, Sāmoan, Marshallese, Chamorro and Fijian communities in the United States. Yet NH/PI students in the state’s K-12 public schools achieve much lower rates on statewide standards in mathematics, science and English language arts compared with all students. Community leaders have long attributed these gaps to structural racism and settler colonialism, forces that have produced land dispossession, displacement through gentrification, environmental racism and poverty stemming from restrictions on Indigenous political and economic self-determination across Oceania.

The new paper builds on a previously published state report, Stories of Educational Wayfinding: Supporting the Educational Voyages of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Students, which documented how disconnection from teachers and peers shapes students’ daily lives. In interviews, one student described missing class for a family member’s funeral without telling the teacher, feeling no connection to the adults at school and not wanting their attention or sympathy. Another student recalled teachers joking about Sāmoans being big, strong and scary. One educator described a student who quit school after sophomore year because they could not handle the jokes and mockery. The report also documented a Chuukese family that hosted relatives for a month of mourning after a death, during which students missed substantial school, only for a teacher to complain that no one answered emails, an example the researchers cite of students being forced to choose between their identity as students and as members of their communities.

These interpersonal dynamics sit atop a long institutional history. Chamoru and Hawaiian languages were banned in schools in Guåhan and Hawai’i until 1974 and 1986 respectively, and after World War I, Chamorro children suspected of hookworm infection were forcibly institutionalized at schools and separated from their families. The authors argue that such policies, far from being isolated historical incidents, produced a continuing legacy of assimilation, identity erasure and cultural loss that still ripples through the wellbeing of Pacific communities today. Within this system, students who internalize prejudice-based beliefs about themselves face damaged self-efficacy, stereotype threat and social exclusion, all documented barriers to academic motivation and achievement.

The WARP framework translates these challenges and solutions into the imagery of a va’a, an outrigger canoe, voyaging between islands across rough water. The students are the voyagers. The waves and currents pushing against the vessel represent systemic barriers, interpersonal racism and internal struggles rooted in settler colonialism. The wind that helps the canoe move past those waves represents healthy, supportive relationships with educators, relationships characterized as mentorship rather than despotism, which research links to a stronger sense of belonging, greater confidence and lower stress. Guided by the stars and ocean creatures, metaphors for ancestors and families, students remain steadfast against forces threatening to capsize their educational journeys. The authors emphasize that students continue to resist these systems, supported by genealogies of care handed down through their communities.

Concretely, the researchers argue that classrooms contain many vā: the relational spaces between student and teacher, student and peers, and student and the learning environment itself. When teachers and students co-establish mutual understanding of vā and its foundational qualities, classroom relationships begin to resemble the cultural connections that sustain Pasifika communities. The paper offers an example from the senior author’s own middle school experience, in which a Hawaiian studies course designated one day a month as unstructured time for classmates to air grievances and make their relationships right through ho’oponopono, a traditional Hawaiian practice of restoring relationships. Crucially, the authors caution that non-Pasifika educators should let students and their families guide any engagement with these practices, so that relationship building does not slide into appropriation or malpractice of sacred cultural traditions.

The paper also highlights community-led programs in Washington that already embody these principles, though the authors are careful to note that none has yet been evaluated with rigorous experimental or observational designs. UTOPIA Washington, a fa’afafine and transgender-led grassroots organization serving Queer and Transgender Pacific Islanders, runs a Mana Youth Program in partnership with three public schools, providing mentorship, cultural teaching and academic support in which educators act as aunties, uncles and elders. In the report’s interviews, students described this network as family and said the support motivated them to attend class and do well. In Eastern Washington, Marshallese families built a language and culture program that teaches mathematics, biology, ecology and physics through the parts of a canoe, assigns students to write about their jowi, or clan, and their family histories, and has been credited by a paraeducator with improving student engagement, attendance, family relationships and graduation rates. Kamehameha Schools in Hawai’i, founded in 1884 by Ke Aliʻi Pauahi Bishop, is presented as a systemic model, organizing learning outcomes around a tree metaphor that encompasses ancestral knowledge, responsibility, love of the land and learner wellbeing.

The implications extend into policy and school social work. The authors argue that diversity, equity and inclusion efforts often stop at cultural awareness without confronting the systemic racism and settler colonialism embedded in curricula, training and policy, and that teu le vā demands deeper structural change, from teacher education to school mental health services. For school social workers, whose field has been criticized for paternalism and a color-evasive lens, adopting teu le vā offers a roadmap for centering students’ agency, community assets and cultural strengths rather than hyper-independence. The stakes are high: the underlying state report found that one in five NH/PI students reported thoughts of suicide, the highest rate among all racial groups. The authors call for future research to implement and evaluate community-led initiatives, conduct needs assessments with NH/PI youth, integrate Indigenous forms of evidence into evaluation frameworks and continue disaggregating NH/PI data from Asian American data. Their conclusion is unambiguous: educational wellbeing is interpersonal and rooted in connection, and no student should have to debate which parts of themselves to sacrifice on their educational journey. When schools honor the vā between students, educators and communities, they argue, Pasifika youth can stand in their genealogies of care and carry their ancestors’ knowledge into every classroom.

Subject of Research: An Indigenous relational framework, WARP, developed to support the educational wellbeing and mental health of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander K-12 students in Washington state.

Article Title: Wayfinding through teu le vā: Developing an indigenous relational approach to support the success and wellbeing of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students in Washington state

Article References: Beck, K. L., Camacho, S. G., Sakurai, M. J., Nguyễn, J., Seto-Myers, D. K., Cheers, J. K., Spencer, M. S., & Halvorson, M. A. (2026). Wayfinding through teu le vā: Developing an indigenous relational approach to support the success and wellbeing of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students in Washington state. SSM – Mental Health, 10, Article 100700. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2026.100700

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.ssmmh.2026.100700

Keywords: teu le vā, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students, Pasifika education, relational wellbeing, Indigenous knowledge, wayfinding, self-determination, school mental health, settler colonialism, Washington state education, culturally sustaining pedagogy, SSM Mental Health