Dr. Phil McGraw recently appeared on "The View" where he spoke about his new book, "We've Got Issues." Dr. Phil said that one of the "issues" in today's world is social media. "In, like, ’08, ’09, smartphones came on, and kids started, they stopped living their lives and starting watching people live their lives, and so we saw the biggest spike and the highest levels of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicidality, since records have ever been kept, and it’s just continued on and on and on. And then COVID hits 10 years later, and the same agencies that knew that, 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 it away and shuts it down?" McGraw said. "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 percent to 60 percent," he continued.

"The View" co-hosts Sunny Hostin and Whoopi Goldberg pushed back on McGraw's comments about schools being shut down, saying it was about "trying to save" the lives of the children. The co-hosts also mentioned that many people died from COVID-19, where Dr. Phil responded "not school children."

"Maybe we’re lucky they didn’t, because they kept them out of the places that they could be sick, because no one wanted to believe that we had an issue," Goldberg continued. Co-host Ana Navarro asked him if he was saying no school children died from COVID. "I'm saying it was 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, and that’s not an opinion. That’s a fact," McGraw responded. During an episode of his show in 2022, he argued that the effect of school closures and lockdowns would have a lasting impact on the children. "Seventy million children will be forever affected by what they’ve gone through with the pandemic — how things were handled when our country was locked down, the pandemic that they’ve endured — all of us will be," he said.