Many are recognizable by their compulsive joking, their pressured, rapid-fire speech, by their seemingly random and aimless hopping from one topic to the next and by their inability to express an idea without exhausting the English vocabulary. “I have never finished a thought in my life,” one young man lamented. Men and women with ADD have about them an almost palpable intensity that other people respond to with unease and instinctive withdrawal.
