Not all suicides suffer in the afterlife equally. Some, especially children and most adolescent suicides seem to be taken in hand by more advanced spirits and, in a manner of speaking, nursed back to spiritual health. A moving account by psychic Ann Puryear recounts the suicide of her son. Stephen was overweight and bullied at school. He skipped school one day and hanged himself from a tree. His mother Ann, herself an experienced medium at first refused to believe that the voice she heard was, in fact her son. After a long struggle, and many months after his death, she finally relented and accepted that it was her son trying to communicate. Eighteen years later, Stephen dictated the account of his death and the afterlife that followed. Like most suicides brought through by modern mediums, Stephen expresses regret for his actions, but makes no excuses for them.
There are other types of suicides for which there are few spiritual consequences. People who voluntarily sacrifice their lives for a heroic purpose, especially in an effort to save the lives of others, don’t appear to suffer the negative spiritual consequences experienced by discretionary suicides. Indeed, those who give their lives to save other innocent people appear to receive a hero’s welcome in their afterlife. One of the major advantages of a true belief in God is knowing that taking a gunman’s bullet to save your wife, a child or your country is not going to be the end of the line. Death is less scary to a person who believes in God than it is to a materialist who believes that his death would mean the end of everything.
The Jews at the siege of Masada in 74 AD are a good example of people who were forced into suicide. They took their own lives after their defeat at the hands of the Romans. They were defending their freedom and their religious faith. In suicide, they prevented the rape, murder and slavery that would have followed surrender. Their motives were pure, and their deaths were the equivalent of soldiers who died defending their country.
A more recent example of non-discretionary suicide would be the Yazidi and Christian girls who were captured by ISIS (the “Islamic” state). Some committed suicide to escape sexual slavery and their decision to die by their own hand would be unlikely to negatively affect the fate of their souls. There are other examples too numerous to mention.
The fate of a person who commits suicide in order to avoid a painful and lingering terminal illness would probably depend on that person’s actual motives and the degree of his or her real need. Once again, it’s the need, motivation and circumstances surrounding a suicide which affect the trajectory of the spirit after death. It’s a matter of spiritual physics, and not an arbitrary decision made by God or a star chamber of holy saints. The fate of a soul after death always depends exclusively on the conscience and mindset of the soul itself, and it’s a thoroughly natural process dictated by circumstances and intentions.