We investigate an N-particle Bose-Hubbard dimer with an additional effective decay term in one of the sites. A mean-field approximation for this non-Hermitian many-particle system is derived, based on a coherent state approximation. The resulting nonlinear, non-Hermitian two-level dynamics, in particular, the fixed point structures showing characteristic modifications of the self-trapping transition, are analyzed. The mean-field dynamics is found to be in reasonable agreement with the full many-particle evolution.