The parents of Tim Whattler, who committed suicide aged 17, believe he was fatally let down by the system of care for autism sufferers. Cassandra Jardine reports

Tim Whattler was a handsome, sporty 10-year-old when his life started to go badly wrong.

	Tim Whattler: although he had friends, he would lash out at other children

"He loved maths and science," says his father, Dean, an engineer. "He had a high IQ and learnt very quickly because he had a photographic memory.

"But he also had a form of autism, so his behaviour annoyed his teachers. When they told him off, he didn't understand their facial expressions and just grinned. If they said, 'Can you get your maths book out?' he would do nothing because he knew that of course he could get his maths book out."

Constantly in trouble, Tim was 10 when he became noticeably depressed.

One morning, his parents found him curled up in the snow outside their home in Bromley, Kent.

He had lain down by the dustbins, hoping never to wake up. That was the beginning of a seven-year battle for help that culminated in Tim's death in February last year.

Dean and Elizabeth Whattler have file after file of correspondence relating to the care of their only child. Everything is intact, like Tim's bedroom, while they decide what to do, following an inquest in May which returned a puzzling verdict.

"The coroner said Tim's death was preventable, yet he did not place any blame on the psychiatric unit where he died, just six hours after he was admitted," says his mother.

"If his death could have been prevented, who exactly is to blame?"

One answer might be the system of care for vulnerable young people to which he was entrusted, and in which the nurses and doctors didn't have all his notes, so were unaware that he had recently tried to kill himself.

That system might also be blamed for his state of mind on the Friday he died.

With suicide the second most common cause of death in the 15-to-24 age group, many families are affected by the game of "dodge the bill" played out between some health, education and social services departments.

The bureaucracy can drive parents to act in ways that they know are not in their child's best interests, just to get some help.

Tim, who was born in 1988, was a normal, happy child until he was three-and-a-half.

"That summer we were on a beach in America," his father recalls. "But when Elizabeth handed Tim a sandwich, he flipped it on to the sand and looked at it."