The long short is "faking their deaths" doesn't mean what we normally think it means. Its more of a therapy tactic for depressed/suicidal people where they get to go through with it. They write goodbye notes, have a funeral, even get put in a coffin for a few hours.
I grew up in a rather small community on the northwestern coast of Norway, home to a lot of small-time fishermen working up in the Arctic.
Just about everyone my age and older still remember when a vessel was lost back in the eighties, initial reports were all hands lost - until suddenly, a week and a half later, the fisherman we'd all mourned for the past days came home, puzzled as to the sensation his appearance made - he and a couple others had been picked up off a liferaft, and Canadian authorities had misspelled his name when notifying their Norwegian counterparts there were survivors after all - so his family had not been notified.
Allegedly, his father's first words upon seeing him was 'F[---] me, did I just die, or is it you who've not died after all?'
Magne is one of the few people I know who've had the pleasure of reading his own obituary.
I also saw a documentary about this, but it was called "A pharaoh to remember". Unfortunately in this one, the fake funeral just made the guy feel worse.
The long short is "faking their deaths" doesn't mean what we normally think it means. Its more of a therapy tactic for depressed/suicidal people where they get to go through with it. They write goodbye notes, have a funeral, even get put in a coffin for a few hours.
I don't know if it works but it seems promising.