An Ottawa couple’s painful decision to leave their severely autistic son at a social services agency this week was an act of desperation fuelled by 10 years of frustration.

Amanda Telford took her 19-year-old son Philippe to the Ottawa office of Developmental Services Ontario on Tuesday after she and her husband Alex decided they could no longer handle him.

“I really love Philippe and I am so sure about what we’re doing,” Alex told the Toronto Star.

“We feel very strongly that we did what we were being led to by the system. This was a very desperate act.”

Philippe on Wednesday went to his “regular school,” a program for autistic people at Ottawa Tech High School, Alex said, and was staying temporarily at a hospice.

“It was an absolutely brutal decision,

Amanda told CTV News, which had cameras follow her and her son as they arrived at the agency’s offices.

That decision was reached only after 10 years of struggling with the system, Alex said.

“We realized as parents we could not maintain his security any more. We can’t control him physically. We can’t ensure his safety. He absolutely needs to be in a safer environment.”

Philippe, who is more than six-feet-tall and burly, cannot speak and functions at the level of a 2-year-old. He also suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome and diabetes. Over the weekend, he was in hospital for a day after swallowing 15 pills, wandered four kilometres from home and then slipped away again Monday night to a nearby home.

The teen had been on a waiting list for a year with Developmental Services Ontario for a place to live, one of 393 people with developmental disabilities in Ottawa in need of a group home, said Anna Lacelle, executive director of Service Coordination Ottawa, which works with DSO.

“Let’s hope for Philippe that we will be able to come together as a community to put something together,” she said.

In emergencies such as Philippe’s, the first task is finding a place with a vacancy that also fits his level of need, she said.

When Philippe’s hospice care ends Friday, “ultimately, it will be a struggle” to get him into a group home, said Alex.

“We’ll have to stick to our guns. If we flinch just a little bit, the process starts again.

When Philippe is in a group setting, with constant care and attention, “he’s happy and that makes me happy,” said his father. “He’s such a cute kid.”

Charlotte Wilkinson, spokeswoman for the Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, said the ministry is doing everything it can.

“The reality is that there’s a very big demand. One person can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Wilkinson said.

The 2012-13 budget increased developmental services spending to more than $1.7 billion, she said. But demand has soared: Ontario provides funds and group homes for more than 18,000 people with a developmental disabilities now, compared with more than 15,000 in 2003.

Teens with autism lose any entitlement to government services after age 18, and in many cases parents are left with no alternative but to abandon their grown children.

One Thornhill mother was advised by provincial officials to leave her 19-year-old son at a homeless shelter, the Toronto Star has previously reported.

The Star has documented the crisis in Ontario that families with autistic children face in a multimedia project nominated for a National Newspaper Award and a Michener Award.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

The series triggered an investigation into the particular plight of families with adult autistic children by Ontario ombudsman André Marin.

That investigation, said Marin spokeswoman Linda Williamson, has collected 722 complaints to date, many of them similar to the Telfords.

The Ontario auditor general launched a review of services after the Star series and the province struck a panel of experts to examine the system.

Read more about: