A disturbing wave of seven suicides and likely drug overdoses has swept through Columbia University so far this school year — and students say fiercely competitive academics and inadequate campus counseling programs are in large part to blame.

The student deaths include three in January alone — two of whom police suspect OD’d, plus an exchange student from Japan who killed herself by leaping from the seventh-floor window of her Broadway dorm.

The four other student suicides came once a month, from September through December, The Post has learned.

They include a promising 21-year-old journalist, a 29-year-old Navy veteran, a Moroccan student and an 18-year-old freshman from Brookfield, Missouri, named Taylor Gilpin Wallace.

“You don’t know how badly I want to jump out that window right now,” Wallace, who would be Columbia’s October suicide, said in a Facetime call from his John Jay Hall dorm room to his mother in Missouri — days before quitting school, moving back home and hanging himself in his basement.

“The only time Taylor did anything, he always did it well,” his mother, Angie, told The Post of her son, who grew up in a town with just 4,400 people and who was valedictorian of his high school class of just 73 students.

“He had competition at Brookfield High School, but nothing like Columbia,” his mom said.

He was surrounded by some of the brightest young minds on Earth — kids who were already starting businesses and nonprofits, or excelling in the arts. Making it all worse, he suffered from depression.

“At one point [at Columbia] he said to me, ‘I don’t fit in here — these students I’m surrounded with are so much smarter than me and so much better than me.’”

His mother said she sought help from the head of Columbia’s Counseling and Psychological Services Office, who “gave me her card.”

“I hung it in his dorm room,” she said — but she was unaware of any outreach they may have attempted. “I definitely feel there’s more that should have been done,” she said.

Jacqueline Basulto, who completed her bachelor’s in political science last fall, told The Post that depression coupled with the rigors of school life nearly drove her to suicide.

“Four hours a night sleep was normal for me,” Basulto recalled.

“I think Columbia has a really hostile, competitive culture,” said Basulto, 21, of Manhattan.

“It’s a place with a lot of people who are striving to be the best at what they’re doing … it makes you want to push yourself harder and harder and harder,” she said, joining student organizations, taking side jobs and internships.

Basulto struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts at Columbia, she said.

“I told them I was feeling suicidal,” she said of calling the school counseling service, “and they told me the first appointment they could give me was in two weeks,” she said.

“I told them my symptoms were very serious — they told me to surround myself with friends and there really wasn’t anything they could do at that time.”

Basulto has started a petition, now filled with similar horror stories, asking that mental health services be dramatically improved.

Despite repeated inquiries by The Post on Wednesday and Thursday, the administration at Columbia declined to answer questions about the past semester’s alarming number of student deaths.

But clearly, the administration is grappling with the tragedies.

As students died over the course of five months, Dean James Valentini, vice president for undergraduate education, had issued carefully-worded condolence emails on the lost students.

The emails largely avoided the words suicide and drugs, and each featured similar boilerplate lists of counseling resources.

But on Thursday, when The Post broke details of the deaths online, the school was the one asking for help.

“As individuals and a community we come together to ask — really to insist — on understanding what more we can do to address the depression and addiction that is so often the cause of these losses,” the school’s vice president for university life, Suzanne Goldberg, wrote in a mass email to students.

Goldberg’s email included five pages detailing “what we have, and, after this, what more we will do.”

The new resources included a spring semester “Mental Health Week,” additional on-campus crisis intervention training for students and community members, and, as recently requested by student leaders, more space and funding for community-building “activities.”

The toll

January 23

Daniel Andreotti, 20, of Ames, Iowa, was found dead inside his eighth-floor room in Hartley Hall dorm. It was his first year at Columbia.

Narcotics paraphernalia was recovered in the dorm, and police sources called the death an overdose, though autopsy results have not yet been released.

“Daniel was a happy guy with immense intellectual curiosity … He would want to be remembered with a smile, not a tear, and with no regrets from those who knew him,” his family said in a statement shared with students. “Please take much care of yourselves, and if you need to, talk with a counselor.”

January 21

Ezekiel “Zeke” Reiser, 21, of Manhattan, was found dead in the West 87th Street apartment he shared with his parents, Columbia adjunct faculty members Nanako Umemoto and Jesse Reiser.

Narcotics paraphernalia was recovered at the scene; the third-year student’s death is believed to have been a drug overdose, police sources said. Autopsy results have not yet been released.

“An exceptional soul who combined an adventurous intelligence with a fundamental sweetness of spirit,” his family called him in an obituary.

January 18

Yi-Chia “Mia” Chen, an exchange student from Waseda University in Japan, jumped from the seventh floor of her dorm at Broadway and 113th Street.

December 18

Mounia Abousaid, a senior literature major from Morocco, was found inside her eighth-floor dorm room at the Broadway Residence Hall at Broadway and West 114th Street.

She had been dead several days, fellow students told The Post. Police sources said she was found with a plastic bag around her head in what is being classified as a suicide.

In her last Facebook post, from September, she captioned a playful photo of herself with a stuffed-animal narwhal: “lifehack: manage your anxieties&existential dread by balancing a stuffed sea mammal on your head.”

November 22

Nicole Katherine Orttung, 21, of Arlington, Virginia, a senior majoring in Euro-American relations and political science, committed suicide during a visit home from school.

She excelled in journalism, writing for the Columbia Spectator and interning as a published reporter for the Christian Science Monitor.

“Her ambition and activity were an inspiration, and they seemed to bubble up from a deep well of enthusiasm for life,” her family wrote in an obituary.

“May Nicole now be at peace and may all her family and friends find peace as well.”

October 27

Taylor Gilpin Wallace, 18, of Brookfield, Missouri, hanged himself in his basement soon after dropping out from his first year at Columbia.

He had been a track and football star and the valedictorian of his high school and aspired to be a heart surgeon, his mother told The Post.

“You have a child who comes from Middle America,” his mother, Angie, said of her son, who suffered from depression.

“He was surrounded by kids who had a social life. He just didn’t connect with the kids. He was popular at home, but not at Colombia. He just felt like he didn’t fit in.”

September 6

Uriel Florez, 29, was a political science major and a Navy corpsman who served in Iraq.

“For reasons that are still unknown, Uri decided to take his life on Sept. 6, 2016, and on Sept. 10, Suicide Prevention Day, my family buried our hero,” his brother, Gabriel Sanchez, who is also a Navy veteran, wrote in the Key West Weekly shortly after the death.

“What would compel someone with a bright future to choose this route? Uri was enrolled at Columbia University in New York. He was handsome and genuine and loved to laugh … These questions linger and hurt immensely … He was proud of his service, and as a Corpsman, he spent his time healing and helping people.”

Additional reporting by Stephanie Pagones