It's the holiday season, so our hearts and minds naturally are preoccupied by all that goes with it. Family time. Faith. Christmas presents and parties.

We don't want to think about ugly things like the cold-blooded killing of eight people in an Omaha shopping mall or the heartbreaking suicide of a cyber-bullied girl in a St. Louis suburb.

But we must.

We must understand these were not acts of rebellion, but of mental illness. And we simply must shake off our collective denial and admit things like that can happen here. And that we don't have enough resources to stop them.

No, there have been no shopping mall massacres, thank God. But the same seething self-hatred that sent 19-year-old Robert Hawkins on his shooting rampage surely simmers in the troubled minds of some of our youth.

And an act of cruelty similar to the one that compelled 13-year-old Megan Meier of Dardenne Prairie, Mo., to hang herself last year -- after a fictitious 16-year-old hottie romanced, then dumped her on MySpace.com -- provoked a prolonged psychotic episode in a young girl here in Bakersfield.

To protect her daughter from the stigma of mental illness, the mother of the girl asked that I not identify her by name. But her daughter's disorder and her family's desperate, months-long search for help is more common in Kern County than most people know, she says.

Despite a family history of bipolar disorder, there was no trace of the mental illness in the girl three years ago. She was 13 and a straight-A student who, like most girls her age, longed to be part of the cool crowd. A chubby child in elementary school, she had endured her share of school-yard taunts, but managed to shed the weight after joining a swim team in the seventh grade.

She had her friends, her mother says, but was shy and vulnerable.

So one morning at school, when one of the popular boys at school asker her to be his girlfriend, she was thrilled. Over the moon with joy. That was on a Monday.

By Friday, the cool kids at school, including Mr. Popularity, informed her it had all been a joke, that he'd never really liked her.

The following week a much-loved elder sister left for college; some classmates teased her over the new track shoes she wore to school. A few days later she had her first manic episode, refusing to sleep, jumping in and out of the shower, "talking a mile a minute and using vulgar language, even in front of her grandma," her mother says.

The family doctor took one look at the tormented girl and immediately suggested psychiatric help, though there were -- and still are -- few local resources that specialize in the psychiatric care of children.

Frustrated and frightened, the girl's parents, who didn't know where to turn for help and had never heard of NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, struggled for nearly five months before finally finding help at the child psychiatry department at UCLA.

Within two days of her admittance into the UCLA program, doctors came back with a diagnosis of early onset bipolar disorder, an illness that normally doesn't show itself until ages 18 to 22. Now 16 and stabilized with medication, the girl still has her ups and downs like any teenager, but is the daughter her parents knew before her junior-high trauma.

"Her doctors say had she not been so teased and stressed her disorder might not have manifested itself at so young an age," her mother says. "The benefit, though, was that we caught it early."

Russ Sempell, a local therapist, president of the Kern NAMI chapter and a tireless advocate for the mentally ill, says early intervention is the key to successful treatment of severe anxiety disorders, but such intervention is rare in our "culture of denial."

"We're all surprised when we hear about it in the media, but the fact is these kids have been at risk for a long time and we haven't been watching for them," Sempell says. "The truth is we're very much under-diagnosing children with disorders."

Sempell says local schools, including high schools, are the best avenue through which to screen children for chronic mental health problems.

Deanna Cloud, administrator of children's services with Kern County Mental Health, agrees. Her department -- which works mostly with Kern's poor and uninsured populations -- served 4,883 children ages 0 to 16 in 2006.

Sadly, she says, the county has neither the money nor manpower to meet the mental health needs of an estimated 7,467 children of all socioeconomic backgrounds of the same age group.

Over the past three decades, we baby boomers have given our children a lot to deal with -- epidemic divorce rates, single moms, absentee dads, lackadaisical attitudes about underage drinking and sex and a host of other problems no child should have to deal with.

Now, payback for those selfish choices has come due and the lack of mental health services for children and teens is a staggering problem in Kern County. One we can't afford to ignore.

And if we do?

"We're going to see more long-term legal intervention, more of a drain of our economic resources," Sempell says. "We're going to see more tragedies if we don't wake up and take care of our kids."