Poverty of ideas Often associated with schizophrenia , dementia , and severe depression poverty of ideas is a thought disturbance in which thought spontaneity and productivity are reduced and are seen in the speech that is vague, has many simple or meaningless repetitions, or is full of stereotyped phrases. Copyright Notice Adapted from Wikipedia. Text is available under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0 ; additional terms may apply.