Catfish

A member of the European Society for Trauma and Dissociation has recently sent in a query about a mother of an adopted teenager with dissociative identity disorder (DID) who has been setting up multiple Facebook accounts for each of her parts and over-riding all the security controls in place. She was worried about the safety issues for the young person. I feel that this new era of technological relatedness and its complexities is something that will increasingly occupy us in the future. However, the issues raised made me associate this dilemma with the recent film Catfish . This dark, thriller-like documentary taps into the psychology of virtual relationships and their unlimited capacity for deception.

Catfish is a low budget documentary set in New York. It begins when the director decides to make a documentary based on his brother's (Nev) unusual internet based relationship. Nev, a photographer himself, develops a relationship with eight-year-old Abby from Michigan who sends Nev a painting of his own photo portrait. Nev, who enjoys the attention he receives, contacts Abby's mother Angela to make sure she is okay with his developing relationship with Abby.

Soon afterwards, Nev finds himself fully involved, through Facebook, with a large number of Abby's friends and family including her attractive, twenty-year-old half-sister Megan. From this point an intense erotic, sexualized text message and email relationship rapidly develops and Nev falls in love with the tantalizing yet evasive Megan.

Intrigued by this family and in particular Megan's evasiveness, Nev, his brother, and another filmmaker friend (Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost), embark on a journey to Michigan to find out who these people are behind Facebook. I will not reveal what they are about to find, but this gripping