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.