“If you learn anything at Cornell, please learn to ask for help,” pleads the administration of the Ivy League school to its student body, which just lost its sixth student this academic year to suicide.

Several students took their own lives by jumping into the area’s picturesque gorges that serve as popular swimming holes at the university’s upstate New York campus.

According to an article by CNN.com, Cornell has responded to the outbreak of suicides by reaching out to its student body via e-mail and advertisements in the student paper and by posting guards at bridges over the gorges.

After a widely reported series of suicides a decade ago, the school stepped up both its training for all faculty and staff to try and spot and help students who may be suffering from depression.

But a school administrator nonetheless told USA Today last week that “It’s well known that Cornell has a reputation as a ’suicide school,’ which is not consistent with the reality of the statistics.”

According to the CNN story, Cornell’s suicide rate is more than three times the national student average this year, but it’s offset overall by several years that were incident-free. The administrator, the school’s director of mental health initiatives, said it’s the public nature of Cornell’s suicides that draw attention.

“When a death occurs at Cornell in one of our gorges, it’s a very public experience,” he told USA Today. “It’s observed by people, many people hear about it.”

There has been just one suicide reported this school year at this university, but there may have been others that were not made public.

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