Sanity, under a subsection entitled "Not as single spies but in battalions", and further detailed in the appendix, Cleckley describes a survey he and others conducted between 1937 and 1939 at a large federal Veterans Administration (VA) hospital on the southeastern seaboard, where he worked as one of the psychiatrists for the ex-service men who were mainly veterans of World War I. Cleckley critiques the "benign policy" of the VA of not diagnosing more psychopathic personality due to giving the benefit of the doubt to issues such as neurasthenia, hysteria, psychasthenia, posttraumatic neuroses, or cerebral trauma from skull injuries and concussions. He concludes the psychopathic personalities have "records of the utmost folly and misery and idleness over many years" and if considering also the number in every community who are protected by relatives, "the prevalence of this disorder is seen to be appalling." Semantic theory Cleckley consistently described the hypothesised central deficit in psychopathy as "semantic" (the 'meaning' of things), early on referring to it as a "semantic dementia" or "dysergasia" (a term of Adolf Meyer's, implying a physiological basis) and later "disorder". He explained that this did not refer to the meaning of life in an abstract sense but to the emotional substrate from which the purposes and loyalties of everyday life are formed and experienced. In using the term semantic in this broad psychosocial sense, he referred to Alfred Korzybski's theory of general semantics. However Cleckley also separately employed an analogy to a language disorder called "semantic aphasia" in explaining the distinction between the appearance of correct functioning on the surface despite an underlying deficit in meaning. This has repeatedly led to the belief that he had suggested the core abnormality is in the use of language, which he has said is a misinterpretation. Today the term semantic dementia refers to a specific neurodegenerative disorder involving loss of semantic memory, while semantic disorder commonly refers to semantic pragmatic disorder associated with autism. Contributors Cleckley states in The Mask Of Sanity that "Dr. Corbett H. Thigpen, my medical associate of many years, has played a major part in the development and the revision of this work". He also credits his and Thigpen's wives, both called "Louise", as well as the "constant encouragement, generous help, and the major inspiration that have come from Dr. Sydenstricker to the Department of Neuropsychiatry." Cleckley also mentions taking inspiration for the structure of his