Last Updated on April 1, 2026 by The Unbounded Thinker
From time immemorial, many people have resorted to suicide when the problems of the physical world become unbearable to them. Suicide has always been seen as the most reliable way of ending all life problems.
However, several mediums and psychics discourage suicide, claiming that suicide never ends our problems. For instance, in her book, “Life After Death: A Renowned Psychic Reveals What Happens to Us When We Die,” Mary T. Browne writes,
“Suicide doesn’t end our problems, it only intensifies them. I can’t emphasize enough that you can’t kill anything. You can stop your physical life but you are still alive in spirit. Talk to people who’ve tried to take their lives and failed. They’ll confirm that the place they went to wasn’t a happy one and that they’re grateful to have been given another chance at life.”
“Ultimately, you don’t escape any hardship by ending your life. It’s not possible to kill yourself because nobody dies. We merely change form. People reincarnate in a future life with the same problems that drove them to suicide. It’s wiser to fight through the trouble during your lifetime than to be forced to repeat it in a future life. The body is a sacred trust. Nobody has the right to end his or her life prematurely. Tragic as it is, suicide is also a cowardly act. No one wants to suffer physical or emotional pain, depression, despair, incurable diseases, financial ruin, or the like. Many people believe they should have the right to end their lives if they’re suffering, or if their quality of life has dramatically changed. I cannot stress strongly enough that you don’t escape any hardship by ending your life.”
As a person who is obsessed with understanding life after death, I’ve read several books on the topic, and I’ve found that several spiritualists agree with what Mary Browne writes about suicide and the ending of problems.
It is widely agreed that suicide only brings an end to the physical circumstances of suffering, while the inner condition that those circumstances created continues to exist. The body may fall away, but inner factors such as fear, depression, despair, anxiety, confusion, or attachment, which do not belong to the body, continue to exist.
Before you transition to higher worlds, these negative states will completely shape the realm you’ll find yourself in, immediately after death, which is the astral realm. Therefore, you will directly experience a reality that reflects the exact condition of your inner world. If the mind was filled with extreme sadness and confusion while you were committing suicide, you will experience an atmosphere of extreme sadness or confusion in the astral realm.
Although many dead souls who did not commit suicide died with negative feelings and thoughts dominating their psyche, the difference is that the thoughts, emotions, and feelings that accompany suicide are usually very intense and concentrated. This is why they are believed to strongly influence the astral world, which is highly responsive thoughts, emotions, and feelings.
In the astral realm, intense anxiety might transform into a labyrinth of shifting walls and confusing paths, depressive feelings and thoughts might transform into an endless dry land, and extreme sadness might transform into suffocating corridors.
When this happens, you cannot escape through suicide because you can’t kill the soul. You will have to fully experience your dark inner world, and the experience will only end when you confront and resolve the emotions and thoughts that created it.
My out-of-body experiences have helped me confirm that this experience could be true. When I visit the astral world, through my out-of-body experiences, I usually find that it is highly shaped by my dominant thoughts and feelings. If I was thinking about a certain person during the day, I will see them in the astral world. If I was feeling anxious during the day, the whole atmosphere of the astral world becomes strange and unsettling, even when there is nothing visibly frightening present. The realm takes on an eerie atmosphere that seems to come from nowhere. I just feel frightened, and I quickly return to my body.
The scary thing about suicide is that you can’t end the horrifying experience of the afterlife by returning to the body because you are already dead. Moreover, there will be nothing to distract you from this experience, forcing you to face the state of mind that you were escaping through suicide.
Therefore, people who commit suicide do not go to hell. Like other souls, they find themselves in the astral world. However, their intense negative thoughts and emotions ensure that their experience is darker. The dark experience worsens when they realize that physical reality was only an illusion, that physical life was a dream, and, therefore, nothing was to be taken too seriously: nothing was too serious to cause suicide. This realization brings deep feelings of regret and sorrow.
Because of this regret, they often become earth-bound souls, tied to the physical world by a desperate wish to return. They long to go back to earthly life and experience it while being fully aware that it is an illusion. Yet the body is gone, and there is no way back, leaving them trapped in a shadow of longing, haunted by the choice they made.
Therefore, the best answer to the question, “What happens to someone who commits suicide?” or “Where do people who commit suicide go?” is that they just go to the astral world, where other dead people go, but their experience is darker and more horrific. Or as Adrian Cooper, in his book, “Our Ultimate Reality: Life, the Universe and Destiny of Mankind” observed, “sometimes a person who has terminated their physical life is so shocked to find they are still very much ―alive but in a non-physical body, and with all of their ―problems still with them, that they remain close to the physical world and become what is known as a ―ghost.”