There is evidence that the most intelligent students are the most susceptible to emotional illness, a University Health Service psychiatrist told the American College Health Association yesterday in Washington, D.C.

The psychiatrist, Dr. Armand M. Nicholai Jr., presented some preliminary findings of a study he is making of 1,454 students who dropped out of Harvard between 1955 and 1960.

"Among the dropouts, there was a strong positive correlation between high intelligence and psychiatric disorders," Dr. Nicholai said. "By 'high intelligence' I mean the extreme of intelligence -- the cream of the cream -- since everyone in the sample was quite bright," he explained.

He believes his data are the first to demonstrate this relationship between intelligence and emotional illness. But he emphasized that more work will have to be done to see if the correlation among dropouts is also true for the undergraduate population in general.

Dr. Nicholai has only begun to process the data from his massive six-year, unsponsored study. He has finished computer runs on five or six of 93 variables. More than one striking discovery has already come out of the project, which promises to increase in significance for Harvard undergraduates as he runs more variables.

For example, his study seems to explode a cherished Harvard belief that nearly everyone (about 95 per cent) who drops out of the College eventually comes back and graduates. Between 1955 and 1960, 24 per cent of each entering class dropped out at one time or another. What has not been known, he said, is that only 49 per cent of those dropouts graduated. About 12 per cent of each class never made it, he claimed.

In arriving at his correlation between intelligence and emotional illness, Dr. Nicholai used predicted rank list (prl) as his measure of intelligence. (The Admissions Office figures a prl for each entering student, taking into consideration his secondary school rank in class, the average of his College Board achievement scores, and his College Board verbal aptitude score.

He then checked his results by using the verbal aptitude score alone as his intelligence criterion. Some people consider it a better measure than prl, Dr. Nicholai said, because it does not take motivation into account.

The two gauges of intelligence produced the same results, however. The higher the prl or the verbal aptitude, the higher was the incidence of dropping out for psychiatric reasons, he found. (About 35 per cent of the dropouts in the sample were diagnosed at UHS as having a specific psychiatric problem.)

Dr. Nicholai has a hypothesis to explain his finding. He believes that the extremely intelligent person is liable to develop intellectually at the expense of other aspects of his personality. Such an individual derives all his satisfaction from his intellectual superiority.

But when that superiority is threatened at a high quality college, he becomes acutely aware of the areas he has sacrificed -- his deficiencies in his relationships with people, for example.

"The gap in his mind between his ideal self, and what he now sees as his real self manifests itself in severe depression," the psychiatrist observed.

In Dr. Nicholai's data, a high percentage of the psychiatric dropouts had a diagnosis of depression.

Depression can so severely curtail the gifted student's academic function- ing that he has to dropout, he continued. "Thus, the intra-psychic gap between his ideal image of self and his real image leads to a gap between his intellectual potential and performance," he said.

His data demonstrate the gap between potential and performance, Among the total sample, it was the psychiatric dropouts who showed the largest gap between prl and actual rank list