While talking about schoolchildren’s mental health issues on “The View,” Dr. Phil abruptly moved from smartphones to protesting Covid shutdowns.
The panel on View didn’t seem quite prepared for Dr. Phil sudden and passionate comments on Covid closures, which he considered extremely harmful to schoolchildren, with Sunny accommodation retorting that “they were trying to save their lives.”
It started relatively calmly as Dr. Phil and the panel discussed the increase in mental health issues facing school-aged children, like depression and anxiety. He argued that it started around 2008 with the proliferation of smartphones and the advent of social media.
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According to the talk show host, that’s when young people “stopped living their lives and started watching people live their lives.”
As a result, he argued, “we have seen the largest rise and highest levels of depression, anxiety, loneliness and suicide since records have ever been kept.”
Dr. Phil McGraw, author of the new book “We’ve Got Issues,” explains why he believes since parents are not the only voice in their children’s ears, they need to be the best voice. https://t.co/cVclFZQmjA pic.twitter.com/KEX4B5pxQ4
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It then quickly catapulted more than a decade into the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent shutdowns. According to Dr. Phil, it was “the same agencies that knew about” mental health issues in schools “that closed the schools for two years.”
“Who’s doing this? Who’s taking away the support system for these kids? Who’s taking it away and shutting it down?” He asked. “And by the way, when they shut it down, they prevented mandated reporters from seeing the children who were being abused and sexually assaulted and, in effect, sent them home and abandoned them to their abusers without any means to look at them and sexually assault them. referrals dropped by 50 to 60%.
That’s when Hostin stepped in, trying to remind him that this wasn’t an isolated decision because there was a larger issue. “There was also a pandemic and they were trying to save their lives,” she retorted.
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Whoopi Goldberg “They were trying to save children’s lives. So, remember, we know a lot of people who died during this. People weren’t hanging around eating candy.”
Responding to the deceased, Dr. Phil replied: “Not the schoolchildren.”
“You know what? We’re lucky,” Goldberg retorted. “Maybe we’re lucky they didn’t, because they kept them away from places where they could get sick because no one wanted to believe we had a problem.”
Ana Navarro asked Dr. Phil pointedly: “Are you saying no schoolchildren have died from Covid?
“I say it was the safest group,” he replied. “They were the least vulnerable group, and they suffered and will suffer more from the mishandling of Covid than from exposure to Covid, and that’s not an opinion, it’s a fact.”
That’s when they had to go to a commercial break, effectively ending the interview.
