In quantum optics, adiabatic elimination simplifies multi-level quantum system by eliminating the fast oscillatory degree of freedom and preserving the slow-varying dynamics, thus obtaining an efficient description of the system. Adiabatic elimination has important applications in quantum simulation and quantum precision measurement. For example, spin-orbit coupling has been realized in ultracold atoms by using three-level Raman coupling and adiabatic elimination. In this paper, we investigate the theoretical method and generalize the adiabatic elimination in three-level non-Hermitian systems and multi-level systems on the basis of standard elimination scheme. These can provide theoretical guidance for realizing the interdiscipline of non-Hermitian physics and spin-orbit coupling effects and their potential applications. We mainly discuss the influences of dissipative effect on the population dynamics of the system, the validity and accuracy of the adiabatic elimination theory under different parameters for both non-Hermitian and two types of five-level systems. Specifically, the dynamics satisfying the large detuning condition gives very accurate results for quite a long evolution time with the adiabatic elimination theory, but when the two-photon detuning δand the Rabi frequency $\varOmega $ gradually increase, leading to the violation of the large detuning condition $ \varOmega,\gamma, \delta \ll \Delta$ , the effective two-level model can no longer describe the fast-varying dynamics of the system even in a short evolution time. Thus the choice of system parameters affects the effectiveness of adiabatic elimination of the excited levels. In a non-Hermitian system, the population in the ground state oscillates with gain periodically at the beginning, while that in the ground state oscillates with loss and decreases with time, with the total population decreasing with oscillation. For long-time evolution the gain in the system causes the population to diverge, and the adiabatic elimination of the effective two-energy level system describes this behavior accurately. The effect of the non-Hermitian parameters on the dynamics of the system in the resonance case is manifested in the case that the total population remains conserved, while the total population tends to diverge for finite two-photon detuning. We find that with the increase of detuning, the divergence appears earlier and the total number of particles can be kept constant by choosing the ratio of gain to loss appropriately. This study provides a theoretical basis for state preparation and dynamical manipulation in dissipative multi-energy quantum systems.