How many more people, do we think, must die before mental health reform in this country gets serious? And by serious, I mean money. I mean staff. By serious, I mean infrastructure. A Guardian investigation has revealed that 271 mental health patients in six years have died owing to failings in NHS care. How high does that number have to rise before we move beyond Instagram posts and politicians’ soundbites? A thousand more deaths? Or perhaps fewer than that, but deaths with louder voices.

These deaths, judged as the result of serious shortcomings when coroners issue a “prevention of future death notice”, are attributed to factors such as not following protocol, treatment delays, medication mistakes and insufficient risk assessments. There are more factors (14 categories in total), and many deaths were attributed to multiple failings. The Guardian’s investigation has been described as shocking. But it isn’t shocking. It is precisely what those on the frontline of mental health services – staff and patients – have been saying, screaming on picket lines, writing on placards, and typing on social media, for years.

The stories included in the report are tragic and seem, if you didn’t know any better, incredible. A woman in Leicestershire tells how her son Brandon took his own life after failings in child and adolescent mental health services. He was, she says, “left to rot”. Her account is full of the details that are so infuriating to service users and their families – details that politicians and the general public do not grasp. As is quite common among those with social anxiety disorders, Brandon found it difficult to attend outpatient appointments. But there was no infrastructure in place for him to be visited at home. A commonsense solution is made impossible because budgets and staff are so threadbare.

It might seem absurd – and it is, absurd and immoral – that Victoria Halliday could write on her release forms from a mental health unit that she was going to kill herself, and still be allowed to leave to carry that act out. But, as despicable as it is, it doesn’t surprise me.

Often, professionals are apologetic and on the edge of tears of frustration themselves

The Guardian found that the joint-highest rates of deaths because of failings in mental healthcare were in Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership Trust, and Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust. The latter is the trust that has cared for me over the past four years. “Cared” here is a word that could disappear as quickly as chalk in rain. Those 14 contributing factors in the report? I have experienced them all.

There was the time I was sectioned and spent 22 hours in a “mental health suite” (read: a small, airless room with two chairs in it) waiting for a bed on an inpatient psychiatric ward (one was eventually found out of borough). There was being released from hospital after sectioning, therapy abruptly stopped, and having no continuing mental healthcare in place. There was running desperately into my GP surgery weeping that I was going to kill myself and a receptionist telling me he would “pass the message on”. There was a different receptionist, at a hospital, pressing a PALS (the NHS complaints system) pamphlet into my hand with an encouraging and insistent nod.

There was recovering in A&E after an overdose, being transferred to a facility that did not stock my medication, and a puzzlement as to why I didn’t have a supply (because I … took it all?). There was the man in the same unit who attempted to hang himself on a ligature point that was not meant to exist. There was telling 20 different professionals in the space of a week that my father was dead (note-taking is all but absent); and that, yes, my name is spelt with two Hs. Being on a therapy waiting list two years long, then moved to another. I could go on. On and on. And compared with Brandon and Victoria, I am lucky. I am still here.

If all this sounds farcical that’s because it is. When I tell people these sorts of things they often shake their heads in disbelief, which rather suggests that all of this awareness-raising doesn’t seem to be really raising the right type of awareness.

It’s not that I don’t know professionals working in the NHS who go above and beyond. But some make mistakes because of the pressures they are under. Often, professionals are apologetic and on the edge of tears of frustration themselves – you don’t go into the health service with the hope of failing patients. There are a few who generally seem incompetent and insensitive, but far more who are either too tired, too overstretched, too budget-poor or too undertrained to provide adequate care.

The devastating thing is that all signs point to the crises in NHS mental health care only worsening. Brexit will increase staff shortages, right from the doctors to the maintenance staff, who buoyed me more than once. Sustainability and transformation plans are closing down facilities to focus on care in the community. Which is an OK plan, until you realise there is nobody to do the caring in the community and no budget for it. Junior doctors are fleeing because of contract imposition (and consultants will follow); psychiatric and GP recruitment is woeful; nursing bursaries have been abolished. The reality of primary and secondary mental health can often be summed up as waiting five weeks for a GP appointment, then waiting months for a psychiatric appointment.

We need to get real. NHS mental health care is for too many people a failure. Whether the solution is introducing a hypothecated tax for the NHS, or a Brexit workaround increasing the percentage of GDP expenditure on health so that, for instance, more specialist therapists – not just cognitive behavioural therapy – can be recruited to cut waiting times, something, and probably many things, needs to change. Or people like Brandon and Victoria will continue to die, and good staff will continue to leave. One thing is for sure: whatever Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt may say, mental health is not being “prioritised”.

• Hannah Jane Parkinson is a Guardian writer