The whole thing reads like a misprint: if you present at your GP’s with mild to moderate depression or anxiety, you will wait, on average, six weeks for treatment, which itself sounds like a significant amount of time. But if you arrive with a very severe mental illness – schizophrenia or bipolar disorder – you will wait much longer, 14 weeks, just for an assessment. The average wait for treatment to begin is 19 weeks. One in six people wait longer than six months. Parking the human beings for a second, it makes no sense as a system: physical and mental health are not equivalent, and having a psychotic episode is not the same as breaking your leg. But in the broadest possible terms, this is like fast-streaming people with arthritis while leaving cancer sufferers in a half-year limbo. It’s not a system anyone would design; it’s hard to fathom how it could simply evolve.

Reading the report from the charity Rethink Mental Illness, though, you cannot park the human beings for very long. Heartbreaking testimonies leap off the page: “These answers were on behalf of my husband, who sadly took his own life six weeks ago … I truly believe that, if he had received therapy sooner, he would still be here.” “I was left for months at a time with no contact from my community psychiatric nurse. Following a suicide attempt, I did not hear from them for a month.”

All the determination in the world cannot make more hours in the day, magic more staff on to community psychiatric teams

The perception of the health service from the outside is of a system left threadbare by nearly a decade of underspending and restructuring, held together by the determination of the people working in it. This is wishful thinking: all the determination in the world cannot make more hours in the day, magic more staff on to community psychiatric teams. What’s really going on is a huge amount of suffering, for want of a plan.

Mental health, bear in mind, has been at the centre of the government’s rhetoric since 2012, when the Health and Social Care Act specifically brought up “parity of esteem”. Its failure to enact or, for that matter, define it notwithstanding, there didn’t appear to be any shortage of intention. There are civic catastrophes going on that seem to be part of a deliberate approach: universal credit is the striking example. It is a failure as a social safety net, but if your plan is to destroy security as a duty of the state then it’s working quite well. Mental illness is not such a case: David Cameron made a specific pledge to bridge not just the esteem gap but also that of funding. Theresa May made what was, in retrospect, an astonishing speech nearly two years ago, in which she undertook to “employ the power of government as a force for good to transform the way we deal with mental health problems”; it was a “historic opportunity”, she said; it would sweep away the years of injustice, the “completely unacceptable stigma”. Sure, she says a lot of things that don’t transpire. Yet the failures in this area speak of something more significant than insincerity. May has been unable to employ that “power of government” because government has, effectively, ceased. It’s disappeared down a rabbit hole in which it has somehow managed to trap us all: when Brexit is all it can talk about, that is all any of us talk about.

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Meanwhile, in the spheres where life is lived, where crises occur and professionals wrestle with them, everyone is forced to proceed as though normal service will resume shortly. The long-term plan for the NHS – slated to consider, among many other things, how to spend the extra £2bn on mental health that the chancellor, Philip Hammond, promised in last month’s budget – was due on 10 December. Two days later, the independent review of the Mental Health Act 1983 was set to deliver, and two days after that, the green paper on adult social care. Taken together, these would be profoundly consequential, not just for spending, waiting lists, targets, the treatment of severe mental illness, and the transition for young adults out of child and adolescent services, but also for the deprivation of liberty safeguards – which themselves, handled badly, represent a serious threat to civil rights. Yet the chances of this work going ahead look ever more remote. Matt Hancock, the secretary of state for health and social care, is another Conservative who has spoken trenchantly of his commitment to mental health – but how does he carve out the time, and command the attention of his party and of parliament, in the wake of the vote on the final deal? Who could concentrate on abstract concepts such as parity, or esteem, while simultaneously strong-arming pharmacists into stockpiling insulin? How do you change the weather from within the eye of this enraging, needless tornado?

One of the tenacious myths of our current politics is that every time the prime minister survives another crisis, the clock is reset, her authority is restored, and she soldiers on. What actually happens is that each crisis draws us further into entropy; processes break down, knowledge is lost, and the cracks in the system have become the system.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

• In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here