In all, six students would die on campus in a “horrible year and a half;” tragic signs of a wave of student stress and mental illness Woolf says is “off the charts” and gripping the Ivory Tower well beyond Queen’s.

Queen’s has given mental health awareness and skills training to 160 residence dons, 1,000 orientation leaders and more than 1,300 student leaders and now has two full-time outreach counselors in residence, where the majority of first-year students live. It now talks about mental health in orientation sessions for parents and has added a mental health nurse to the student counseling team.

But this is not just a Queen’s problem. A 2009 survey of six Ontario campuses showed 53 per cent of post-secondary students feel overwhelmed by anxiety, 54 per cent felt hopeless and more than a third said they felt so depressed it was difficult to function. A full 7.2 per cent said they had “seriously considered suicide.”

The Canadian Association of College and University Student Services — the front-line folks who help students in distress — released a sweeping report this summer grappling with the issue of mental health on campus, and has struck a working group to hammer out solutions.

Association president Chris McGrath, dean of students at Seneca College, told the panel colleges and universities are in the perfect position to help address mental illness because students are the age group most likely to begin experiencing symptoms and suicide is the second most common cause of death of people aged 18 to 24, after car accidents.

“We have to be able to talk about suicide without worrying we’re going to put the idea in someone’s head,” said McGrath. “It’s about providing counseling services and sophisticated teams of psychologists and psychiatrists and cross-disciplinary teams to assess the risk.

“Yes, resources are constrained, but it’s a matter of life and death and I don’t think we have a choice.”

The University of Toronto was so keen to battle a rising tide of student anxiety; it put cardboard clothes hangers loaded with stress-busting ideas in all residence closets this fall.

At George Brown College, where the number of new students who arrive with a psychiatric disability has soared 95 per cent in three years, the director of student affairs calls anxiety and depression “the salt-and-pepper issues of mental health. George Brown has trained 50 staff in a two-day certificate program called Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST).

Centennial College has launched a training program called Safetalk, a three-hour session on how to identify people thinking of suicide and connect them with the help they need.