Educational reference
About this symptom
Disorganised thinking describes difficulty organising and connecting thoughts. Because thought is observed through speech, it is usually noticed when someone talks.
It ranges considerably in degree. Mildly, speech may drift between loosely related topics, answers may address something adjacent to the question, or the thread may be lost partway through. More severely, speech may become very difficult to follow, with words or fragments that do not connect in a way listeners can track.
From the inside, this is often experienced as thoughts arriving too quickly, jumping, or being interrupted, rather than as speaking unclearly.
It is worth distinguishing this from being unclear because a topic is complex, or from the tangents common in ordinary conversation. What is described here is a change from how the person usually communicates.
Disorganised thinking makes ordinary interactions harder in both directions, and people often withdraw partly because conversation has become effortful and because others respond to the difficulty.