Unknown Number

DISCLAIMER | Do not read if you plan to watch the documentary "Unknown Number: The High School Catfish" as there may be spoilers.

Netflix’s new documentary Unknown Number: The High School Catfish has sparked a storm of conversation online. Viewers are debating the people at its center, the ethics of the release, and what the story reveals about deception in the digital age. Beyond the headlines, though, the series surfaces a deeper issue worth unpacking, and one that’s often misunderstood: Munchausen by Proxy (MBP).

For decades, Munchausen by Proxy (MBP), also known as Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another (FDIA), has been one of the most chilling forms of abuse recognized in psychiatry. Traditionally, it involves a caregiver, often a parent, who fabricates or induces illness in someone under their care to gain attention, sympathy, or control. The archetype is familiar: a child forced to use wheelchairs, forced into surgeries, or medicated unnecessarily, while the caregiver is celebrated as a tireless, selfless protector.

But as society has digitized, so too have the tactics of manipulation. The recent documentary Unknown Number illustrates a new frontier: MBP without hospitals, scalpels, or pills — but with text messages, phone calls, and digital illusions.

Traditional MBP: The Performance of Care

To understand what Unknown Number reveals, it’s worth grounding in MBP’s classic form. At its heart, MBP is not about illness itself but about the performance of caregiving. The abuser requires a victim to be perceived as helpless and themselves to be perceived as heroic. The child’s suffering becomes a stage on which the caregiver can perform martyrdom.

The defining traits include:

1. Manufactured dependency: convincing others that the victim cannot function alone.
2. External validation: praise, sympathy, or even material benefits for the caregiver’s “sacrifice.”
3. Isolation: cutting the victim off from alternative sources of truth.

This is why MBP is so dangerous — not only physically, through unnecessary medical interventions, but psychologically, by reshaping the victim’s entire sense of self.

Unknown Number: A Digital Stage for Dependency

The documentary shifts the setting from hospital wards to the digital landscape. The manipulator in Unknown Number constructs elaborate crises through text messages, causing a situation in which the victim (Lauryn) is made to believe she is in danger, and is put under the threat of emotional collapse.

Unlike classic MBP, with digital MBP there are no doctors, feeding tubes, or prescriptions. Instead, there are ringing phones at midnight, urgent messages, and digital breadcrumbs that cause the victim's mental state of fragility. The effect, however, is structurally the same:

1. A manipulator who gains attention, control, and validation through manufactured helplessness.
2. A closed system where the only “truth” available is the one provided by the abuser.

Comparing Old and New Forms

What makes Unknown Number so striking is how closely it mirrors MBP despite shedding its medical trappings.

Medium of Control: Traditional MBP manipulates through medicine and institutions. In Unknown Number, the manipulation is mediated by screens (texts) and voices (the "consoling one" of the mother).

Substrate of Illness: In MBP, illness may be exaggerated or induced but often has some physical anchor (symptoms, hospital records). In Unknown Number, “illness” exists only as narrative, untethered to the body.

Audience: Classic MBP requires outsiders — doctors, neighbors, charities — to validate the caregiver’s role. In Unknown Number, the manipulator needs only the victim’s belief.

In both, the abuser thrives on being indispensable. The stage has simply shifted.

The Broader Implications: MBP Without Medicine

What Unknown Number highlights is that MBP should not be understood solely as a medical phenomenon. At its essence, it is about manufacturing helplessness in another person to fulfill the abuser’s psychological needs. Whether through blood tests or text alerts, the outcome is the same: victims are destabilized, isolated, and convinced of their incapacity, while abusers bask in the glow of their own supposed selflessness.

The digital age makes this even more insidious. Where traditional MBP required medical access, knowledge, and community visibility, digital manipulation requires only a phone and the ability to manipulate the victim or to tell a convincing story. What once demanded years of face-to-face deception can now be spun from behind a screen.

The Next Chapter of MBP

Munchausen by Proxy has long horrified because of its physical costs — children subjected to unnecessary surgeries, families duped, communities misled. Unknown Number shows that the same psychological mechanics can now unfold without a single prescription, in the virtual theater of constant connectivity.

If traditional MBP was about bending bodies to tell a story of caregiving, digital MBP is about bending minds. The core remains unchanged: the abuser thrives not on the victim’s health or sickness, but on their helplessness, dependency, and belief.