Talk show host Phil McGraw, better known as Dr. Phil, resisted The View co-hosts’ defense of school shutdowns during the coronavirus.
While discussing the increase in mental health struggles among youth in recent years due to a greater reliance on media connectivity, McGraw pointedly noted that the “mismanagement of COVID” has only caused greater spikes in young people’s anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicide.
“The same agencies that knew that,” McGraw stated, “are the agencies that shut down the schools for two years. Who does that? Who takes away the support system for these children? Who takes them away and shuts them down?”
“And by the way, when they shut it down, they stopped the mandated reporters from being able to see children that were being abused and sexually molested and, in fact, sent them home and abandoned them to their abusers with no way to watch. And referrals dropped 50[%] to 60%,” he added.
Co-hosts Sunny Hostin and Whoopi Goldberg immediately pushed back.
“But there was also a pandemic going on, and they were trying to save people’s lives,” Hostin said.
“They were trying to save kids’ lives. Remember, we know a lot of folks who died during this. So people weren’t laying around eating bonbons,” Goldberg added.
McGraw noted that schoolchildren were not considered a vulnerable population to die from the virus, to which Goldberg quipped, “Maybe we’re lucky they didn’t because we kept them out of the places that they could be sick because no one wanted to believe we had an issue.”
When further asked about his perspective, McGraw reiterated that he believes school-aged children were considered “the safest group.”
“They were the less vulnerable group, and they suffered and will suffer more from the mismanagement of COVID than they will from the exposure to COVID,” McGraw said. “And that’s not an opinion; that’s a fact.”
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New research published Monday by the American Academy of Pediatrics showed antidepressants for teenagers and young adults drastically increased during the pandemic.
The study’s authors noted that the increase may be due, in part, to increased waitlists for psychotherapy treatments.
