The boy was abducted by the Lord's Liberation Army to serve as a child soldier when he was 7. He had been forced to kill his uncle with a machete.
At 14, he escaped and made his way back to his parents. But he wasn't himself.
He couldn't sleep at night, and during the day, he'd run around the village screaming. He was fighting back thoughts of suicide.
"No one knew what to do with him," says Peter Oketayot, a mental health counselor with the nonprofit Vivo in Northern Uganda, who eventually treated the teenager.
"They were calling him names. They thought he was mad, or crazy," Oketayot says. In fact, the teenager was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as well as depression.
And he isn't the only one. According to a new study in Frontiers in Psychiatry, 30 percent of girls and half of boys in northern Uganda have been abducted at least once. Nearly a third of abducted youth suffer from PTSD. Twelve percent of other teens did as well.
[For more of this story, written by Maanvi Singh, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/goats...-how-can-he-be-saved]
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