The initiative encourages discussion about mental health issues and was first launched in 2011.

Telecommunications company Bell has pledged five cents for every applicable text, call, tweet, retweet, social media video view, use of Facebook frame and use of Snapchat filter.  

All 56 U SPORTS member institutions are official partners of the campaign, with the hope it will help Canadian student athletes.

"It's a very, very difficult job being a student-athlete – it's very time consuming," said former ice hockey player Peter Soberlak, who is now athletic performance advisor at Thompson Rivers University. 

"Their schedules are very, very busy, and there's a lot of pressure on them to perform both in the classroom and in the athletic environment.

"When I was an amateur and a professional athlete, we didn't talk about these issues. 

"It was a sign of weakness to go to a coach or a member of an organisation and say that you were feeling anxious or overwhelmed, or I'm depressed."

The Canadian Olympic Committee is also a partner of Bell and the Let's Talk programme.

Thirty-two per cent of students were diagnosed or treated for anxiety or depression in 2016, according to Canada's most recent national college health assessment survey.

Dr. Carla Edwards, a sport psychiatrist who serves as the mental health representative for the U SPORTS Medicine and Research Science Committee, said: "I think the biggest pattern I've seen is a fear of people finding out.

"I've felt often that I'm sort of the person in the shadows helping them because they don't want their parents to know that they're seeing me, or they don't want their team-mates or room-mates or their friends to know they're seeing a psychiatrist because there is still a stigma associated with it."