‘I’M so focused on getting through each day, I don’t even know how to begin to get my life back.” Stephen* twirls a biro fitfully between his fingers. It’s a bad day for the anxiety.

“I went to university. I had a good job. I was healthy. I didn’t think this would happen.”

Too slim for a man so tall, his clothes cling awkwardly to his hunched frame. Grown-out hair striated with silver, he resembles a scarecrow that’s somehow wandered into this small, neat flat – familiar in form, but inanimate and lost to some distant thought. The place would look minimalist if I wasn’t privy to the info that he’s sold most of what he owned for food and rent. He’s been out of work for 18 months now. Hundreds of applications, and too many rejections later, things show little chance of improving. Out-competed for the good jobs, overqualified for the rest. Several times he has lost out because he’s a "flight risk".

“They reckon I’m going to leave when something better comes along.” He laughs. “They just don’t realise nothing better is coming. This is it.”

Once an account manager at a design firm, he was cut loose when the agency went into liquidation. “Cash flow”, he imparts. Without warning, life turned inside out. Overnight, he was in freefall, and left to watch the speedy corrosion of everything he lived for. With no income, rising debt, and with no safety net his mental health deteriorated. Eating became erratic, leaving the house became scaling Everest. Depression. Anxiety. Insomnia. Trapped in a spiral of worsening health and punitive sanctions, he thinks often about ending his life.

“It feels like I’m running uphill constantly. Eventually you just think there’s little point in running anymore. There’s little point in anything.”

Stephen’s home town is hundreds of miles away. The only family he has left there is a mum who’s struggling to make ends meet on her part-time salary. It all goes to keep hold of her one-bedroomed flat. He knows arriving on the doorstep would only be a burden to someone who’s already barely coping. And men in their thirties don’t live at home.

Stephen was the first person in his family to go to university. He believed that you really could change your life with grit and good grades. There’s nothing to go back to, he says, and nothing for him here. He can’t afford to do anything he used to enjoy, and his friends stopped calling. He can’t pay the phone and internet bills he needs to keep on top of his job searches. Each brown envelope brings fresh horrors. He’s long stopped answering the phone and the door.

“This isn’t living.” His voice cracks, mournful. “It’s existing.”

By now, most of us know a story like this. With one in four adults suffering from a diagnosable mental health illness in a year, most of us know a Stephen. We might even be Stephen. When your health fails, your world slips into landslide. When catastrophe hits, few are resourced to withstand the tumble, or to recover fully.

But there's good news, it seems. David Cameron to the rescue. The first British Prime Minister to give a speech on mental health, he’s pledged almost a billion pounds annually to “transform” care. This is undoubtedly a landmark moment – breaking down the stigma that shrouds the issue is vital. We’re long overdue some leadership . We need the message of “it’s okay to not be okay” to permeate every corner of society, so a big voice is welcome. As are the funds. Why is it then, that this feels awfully contrived?

Last week’s Mental Health Taskforce report, The Five Year Forward View for Mental Health, is a damning indictment. Britain is failing vulnerable people. Bifurcated health services, lack of resources and underfunding has caused “thousands of tragic and unnecessary deaths.”

With this in mind, the Prime Minister’s response is virtuous enough. Of course we need responsive emergency care. Of course we need better perinatal services. Of course we need improved services for those with eating disorders. We do need to transform mental health services. Frankly, it shouldn’t have taken this long for the Government to cotton on. When suicide is killing more men under 50 than anything else, it is time to take action.

The problem is these are end-point fixes. End-point fixes that show the Government’s failure to acknowledge its role in this health crisis. The policy does not match the problem. These are reactive rather than proactive measures, and they do little to hide the truth. This is an attempt to white-knight Britain. It’s an election-friendly clean-up job. Noble on the surface, but in reality, it’s the necessary mopping up of austerity’s human fallout. Our memory is not so short that we’ve forgotten the cuts to essential services that has brought this country to its knees.

We’re never going to transform mental health against this political backdrop. When life has become so hard for ordinary people to live, what is there to get better for when a catastrophe hits? Quality of life depends on delicate interplay of myriad forces; work, health, belonging, social relationships, financial well-being, security, and emotional wellbeing. It takes a bold man to deny how hard these pillars have shaken in recent times. When quality of life suffers, the mind isn’t far behind. Crisis care is vital, but prevention is better.

The politics of austerity have started a cataclysmic domino effect for many: as one area crumbles, another follows. The Tory rhetoric continues to drive a wedge between "hard-working people" and the rest. How can people pull themselves up if they don’t have the will or the reason to do it? Behind the veneer of caring Conservatism is a government that has cleaved this country in two – into Us and Them. Here the put-upon rich have to suffer the indolent poor.

People don’t want crumbs. They want a realistic chance of making their own way in the world.

THE funding announcements are vital. We need these services. But allow me to join the dots for you, Mr Cameron. You lost the hearts and minds of this country long ago. Those tragic and unnecessary deaths are borne from a climate of rampant social injustice your policies have galvanized. You cannot sincerely proclaim a sea-change without admitting what you’ve done. You must face the part you played in creating this desert.

You don’t get to destroy things and then play the caring hero. I see you, Mr Cameron. Your transparency is galling.

I ask Stephen about the announcements – mortified at bringing up ministerial speeches to someone living on buttered toast.

“I don’t hold much hope for change. Too many broken promises. Why should I believe this one’s any different?”

This is the gGovernment that cried wolf. The people it has failed can’t wait until 2020 for service trickle-down. They need help now. They need guidance before things reach the tipping point. They need prospects. They need social mobility. They need a shred of hope that life can get better for people like them. Funding pledges can fix that. The damage is done, and will continue as long as our politics deepen inequality. Like some twisted fairytale, until this Government finds a heart, a brain, and the courage to face the reality of bootstrap Britain, little will change.

The cat is out of the bag. We know the true price of Cameron’s Britain. It’s us.

*Name changed to protect privacy