Thank you for the response, Toofat! 
Well, to be perfectly honest, as long as I hardly knew them, I expected someone more intimate to protect them from the abuses they were obviously exposed to. Not that I was indifferent, you know; but it would have been weird if a perfect stranger like myself had jumped to their defense, whereas their own relatives seemed unaffected by it all. Now that we’ve been acquainted for quite some time, I would of course react differently.
If I can, I’d really like to help my mate (the guitar player), because it seems to bother him a lot, although he keeps it to himself and feels somehow “guilty” (!) for being victimized, which takes the cake, IMO. Because, well, he certainly is cool in about every sense of the term. Where all the instinctive animosity comes from is beyond me. “A tone” – What tone? A look? What look? Something indefinissable. I was asked and didn’t see anything. Eventually, he thinks he’s got a “bad aura”, his terms. Well, I am a down-to-earth Cartesian mind and not into this kind of things. But his fatalistic attitude, if that’s what you meant, certainly encourages abuse. It’s obviously an acquired trait, though.
As recently as a week back, I was still totally ignorant, as far as ADD is concerned. It seems to fit him well, but I am perhaps mistaken?
REPORT ABUSE