Naina Mishra seemed to turn up at the yoga studio in Euston, north-west London, out of nowhere. She wasn\u2019t referred by anyone; she didn\u2019t come with a friend. A 21-year-old woman of Indian heritage with an American accent who grew up in Hong Kong and had recently arrived in London, Naina just \u201cfell in\u201d off the street in January 2022, say her yoga teachers, Hamish Hendry and Louise Newton. But it became part of her daily life. Every morning, she returned to practise there.<\/p>\n
Chatting after class, they learned that Naina had just graduated from university in the US and had been interning at the investment bank Goldman Sachs and the consulting firm McKinsey. She was studying in London before beginning a high-flying job as a business analyst at McKinsey in New York in the autumn. \u201cShe was really focused,\u201d Newton remembers. \u201cShe would say, \u2018My goals are to be a CEO, to have three children, to be married.\u2019 She was really clear on what the future was going to hold for her.\u201d By May 2022, she had left London to embark on her next chapter.<\/p>\n
But 18 months later, in November 2023, Naina was back \u2013 and she was a different person. \u201cShe\u2019d do her posture, then zone out,\u201d Hendry says. When he asked if she was having intrusive thoughts, she told him she didn\u2019t know. \u201cShe was like a shadow of herself,\u201d Newton says. \u201cShe was here, but out of it, just very slightly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Throughout 2024, Naina kept changing address. She began to say strange things. \u201cShe was determined she was going to live in a specific house on Highbury Fields and said she\u2019d contacted the owner to say that she wanted to live there,\u201d Newton tells me. After a conversation with Hendry about a high-end yoga-wear brand, she told them she had bought every item in the range. One day, Naina announced she\u2019d bought the entire range of Jellycat stuffed toys.<\/p>\n
Then, in August 2024, Naina messaged Hendry to say people were following her and she had changed her phone number and was going to have to change her name. \u201cI don\u2019t know anyone outside the shala [yoga studio],\u201d she wrote, \u201cso on the rare occasion someone you don\u2019t know asks about me, they should be sent away.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hendry and Newton say they \u201csignposted\u201d her to mental health services, but Naina kept changing her phone number, and after the second or third time, they lost contact with her. Just as Naina fell into the studio out of nowhere, she seemed to disappear into thin air.<\/p>\n
But somebody was trying to track Naina down: Vandana Luthra, the mother Naina had told Hendry and Newton was dead. The story of Naina Mishra\u2019s final year in London is one of family estrangement and mental health crisis. It shows how ill-equipped we are at recognising the signs of mental illness, and how powerless parents can be if their young adult children say they want to be left alone. For months, Vandana had been going to extraordinary lengths to find Naina, desperately clutching at every straw because she believed her daughter\u2019s life was at risk. And she was right. By October 2024, Naina was dead.<\/p>\n
Vandana speaks to me for many hours, over several days, from her sister\u2019s home in Connecticut, US. She\u2019s on sabbatical from a finance job in Hong Kong while her son has psychiatric treatment here. There\u2019s a history of mental illness in the family, Vandana says \u2013 Naina\u2019s grandmother is schizophrenic; her great-grandmother and great-aunt lived with mental health problems.<\/p>\n
\u201cNaina always wanted to do things on her own,\u201d Vandana says. \u201cShe was someone who did everything herself.\u201d As a child, Naina loved baking cookies, reading books, pretending to be a ninja with her younger brother. But she spoke very little. A teacher at her primary school in Mumbai once called Vandana in to discuss why Naina was so quiet. \u201cShe said, \u2018You should really quit your job and be there for your child.\u2019\u201d Vandana pauses, ruminating on this memory. \u201cThese things stay in my head now, because I don\u2019t have her any more.\u201d<\/p>\n
The family moved from Mumbai to Singapore in 2011, then Hong Kong in 2014, by which time Vandana was divorced and bringing up her children as a single mother. She and Naina used to be very close, Vandana says. \u201cBy the time she was in high school, she was taller than me. She used to call me Little Mommy.\u201d Gauri Nafrey, a family friend, had known Naina since she was a baby. \u201cAs a teenager, Naina was a kind of A-lister: the dress, the makeup, the hair, everything was beautiful,\u201d she tells me. \u201cA complete go-getter: strong, smart, doing really well academically \u2013 the works.\u201d After spending summer camp in the US aged 13, Naina decided she was going to settle in New York. At 16, she\u2019d set her mind on a job with McKinsey. She got a place at Northwestern, a competitive university on the outskirts of Chicago, majoring in economics and business entrepreneurship.<\/p>\n
Naina in 2011, the year her family moved from India to Singapore. Photograph: courtesy of Vandana Luthra<\/p>\n
In January 2019, during her first year of college, Naina rang Vandana to tell her she had been sexually assaulted by someone the previous September, when she had just arrived in her dorm. \u201cObviously it was shocking.\u201d Vandana\u2019s eyes are wide. She was at work when she took the call. She walked away from her desk to try to get some privacy. Questions began tumbling out. Were there condoms? Could she have caught diseases? Naina said she managed to escape before it got that far. How could this have happened, Vandana asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose questions fell badly,\u201d she concedes. \u201cShe said, \u2018You\u2019re accusing me.\u2019 I was not \u2013 I was in a state of shock, just processing that sequence of events.\u201d But Naina hung up and they didn\u2019t speak for a few days. (Naina made a formal complaint about the student who was suspended from college for a year.)<\/p>\n
After that, Vandana says, Naina began to change. \u201cShe was much more depressed. She kept talking about rape on campus \u2013 she wanted me to read everything about it.\u201d Vandana was used to regularly exchanging messages and having calls with her daughter, but now Naina would sometimes go silent for days on end. From halfway across the world, Vandana tried to stay in her daughter\u2019s life. She got one of Naina\u2019s flatmates to help coordinate a surprise birthday party for her 21st in 2021, ordering champagne and food from a restaurant Naina liked. She and Naina still spoke, but not as much.<\/p>\n
The trip to London in 2022 was a bit of a jolly that allowed Naina to maintain her student visa before starting work at McKinsey in the autumn. She deliberately picked a literature course that required very little academic work. She did a wine course and a Thai cooking course, as well as all the yoga. \u201cRich people things,\u201d her mother says, drily. Vandana didn\u2019t mind funding it all \u2013 Naina was getting to enjoy her youth and freedom \u2013 but wishes she\u2019d paid for it directly. \u201cThen I would have known the places she went to.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nafrey and her family had been living in London since 2016, and she invited Naina over one night. \u201cI had not seen her for six, seven years. She was completely different from the Naina I remember: soft-spoken, self-deprecating, nothing fancy about her clothing, no makeup,\u201d she says. \u201cI was, like, what happened to you?\u201d<\/p>\n
Naina didn\u2019t mention it to Nafrey, but she had been having sessions with a London-based psychotherapist. In February 2022, she created a Google Drive account and asked Vandana to send over all the pictures she had of her as a very young child. Once they had been received, Naina told Vandana she didn\u2019t want to talk to her for a while. \u201cI am undergoing a difficult treatment for my PTSD and chronic pain. Due to the difficult nature of the treatment, I\u2019m unable to speak with you at this time,\u201d she texted. It was the first time Naina had mentioned PTSD to her mother. (The therapist Vandana says Naina saw in London did not want to participate in this piece, neither confirming nor denying that Naina had seen her, citing patient confidentiality.)<\/p>\n
When they finally spoke, it was May 2022. In a three-minute phone call, Naina told Vandana that, when she was three years old, two strangers had raped her in the bathroom of her grandparents\u2019 house in a suburb of Delhi. Vandana was bewildered by this. \u201cMy children have never been left alone. There are no strange men coming into my mother\u2019s bathroom. The whole thing was just not plausible.\u201d She knew she\u2019d alienated Naina the last time her daughter had confided in her, and tried to handle things differently. \u201cI said, \u2018I\u2019m sorry this happened. How come I didn\u2019t know about it?\u2019 And she said, \u2018I couldn\u2019t tell you because you were a bad mother.\u2019\u201d When Vandana asked more questions, Naina hung up.<\/p>\n
I was in full panic mode, trying to find her: if Naina can leave her dream job, her dream city, something\u2019s very wrong<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
They kept in touch, mainly over WhatsApp and email, but the abuse was never mentioned again. \u201cMy plan was whenever I saw her next, I was going to sit her down and talk to her about it \u2026 \u201d Her voice trails off. She didn\u2019t see Naina again until four days before her death.<\/p>\n
After leaving London in 2022, Naina had to sort out the rental agreement for her New York apartment. She insisted she didn\u2019t want anyone to act as a guarantor and begged her father, who was living in Mumbai, <\/strong>and her mother to put enough money into her bank account to reassure her landlord. By this point, Naina\u2019s brother was in mental health crisis, disappearing for 10 days at a time. \u201cThere was so much on my plate, so much shit going on all around me,\u201d Vandana says, bitterly. \u201cShe\u2019s never blown her money. So I was, like, all right, just give it to her.\u201d About $140,000 (\u00a3103,000) went into Naina\u2019s account. \u201cThat\u2019s the mistake I made.\u201d Vandana screws up her eyes. \u201cOnce she had that huge amount of money in the bank, she cut contact.\u201d<\/p>\n
Naina changed her phone number. She stopped replying to her mother\u2019s emails, then changed her email address altogether. Vandana tried to message Naina\u2019s friends on Facebook and LinkedIn, only to find almost all of them had blocked her. One replied, saying Naina was thriving in New York. The books Vandana read on family estrangement and the psychologist she consulted in Hong Kong all said the same thing: give her space and she might reconnect.<\/p>\n
For a year and a half, Vandana tried to let Naina be. But it went against every fibre of her being. When a friend was due to visit New York in early January 2024, Vandana asked her to reach out to Naina and take her for coffee. Naina replied saying she wasn\u2019t in New York any more \u2013 she\u2019d left McKinsey and moved back to London. \u201cThen I was in full panic mode,\u201d Vandana says. \u201cIf Naina can leave her dream job, her dream city, and go to London, something\u2019s very wrong. That was when I unleashed everything possible I could think of to try to find her.\u201d<\/p>\n
Naina did not see a mental health professional during the last year of her life. She had no documented mental health issues, beyond the PTSD diagnosed in New York in 2022. But Vandana\u2019s experience with her son\u2019s psychosis left her convinced Naina must be in crisis. Reluctantly, Vandana says, she hired three London-based private investigators (she estimates she spent at least \u00a36,000 on their services). She tried to reach out to Naina\u2019s closest friends once again, emailing them at their work addresses, or appealing to their parents to pass on her messages. The mother of one of Naina\u2019s high school friends refused, saying if her daughter had chosen to block Vandana, she would \u201crespect her boundaries\u201d. The only friend still willing to speak to Vandana revealed that Naina seemed to have cut herself off from everyone. She had quit social media; she wasn\u2019t in any of the pictures from a close friend\u2019s wedding.<\/p>\n
Through an acquaintance at McKinsey, Vandana learned that Naina had spent half the year she\u2019d been working at the company signed off on disability leave. She contacted McKinsey\u2019s director of HR, explaining that she was estranged from Naina but concerned for her mental wellbeing, and asked if they could share the reason Naina was on leave, and anything about her current whereabouts. Vandana was told privacy laws prevented them from giving her this information. (McKinsey declined to comment for this piece.)<\/p>\n
Only one of the three private investigator agencies could find out anything about Naina\u2019s life in London. By mid-January 2024, they had provided an email address, a UK phone number and an address in Walthamstow, east London. Vandana immediately packed a suitcase with a change of clothes and food she knew Naina loved \u2013 paneer, pesto, sun-dried tomatoes \u2013 boarded a flight and headed straight there.<\/p>\n
It was a small house. \u201cSuch a dingy place,\u201d Vandana says. She learned the rooms were all rented on Airbnb, and Naina was no longer there. She checked into a nearby hotel, lay on the bed, and had a panic attack. \u201cThe walls and the ceiling were collapsing on me. But I just had to keep trying.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vandana Luthra at her home in Hong Kong \u2026 \u2026 and a photograph there of Naina. Photographs: Chan Long Hei\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
A hotel receptionist let Vandana borrow her phone to ring Naina\u2019s number. Naina answered, but hung up when she heard Vandana\u2019s voice. The receptionist suggested asking the police to do a welfare check. They were reluctant, Vandana says, but she begged them. \u201cI said, \u2018As a mother, I know something is wrong with my daughter. Please hear me out.\u2019\u201d When an officer contacted Naina, she informed them her mother was dead. \u201cThat\u2019s what they told me,\u201d Vandana says. \u201cI said, \u2018No, that\u2019s not right \u2013 I have my passport with me, her birth certificate, you can see my name on it.\u2019\u201d Vandana returned home, her bags still packed with food.<\/p>\n
In a statement, the Metropolitan police said, \u201cWhen officers attended Ms Mishra\u2019s address she told them she did not wish to have any contact with the person who had reported the concerns. As she was an adult and officers had no concern for her welfare, her wishes were respected.\u201d It was a rationale Vandana would hear again and again: Naina was over 18, she was not in obvious crisis, she had a right to privacy.<\/p>\n
A missing people\u2019s charity told Vandana they couldn\u2019t do anything without a police report. The two lawyers she consulted said there was no chance of her getting any kind of guardianship over Naina without firm evidence that she was unable to take care of herself. The Indian consulate could not help. The therapist Naina had seen in London in 2022 refused to speak to her family without Naina\u2019s consent. Vandana emailed two sisters the private investigator said were subletting a different flat to her daughter, enclosing a photo of her and Naina together. \u201cEven if she does not want to talk to anyone, at least I should know she is safe,\u201d Vandana wrote. The women replied saying Naina had left some time ago, they had never met her and were unnerved to have been tracked down like this. Increasingly desperate, Vandana returned to London and visited a nail salon Naina had recently reviewed online, asking staff to alert her if her daughter ever made another booking. They never did.<\/p>\n
How did nobody who interacted with Naina pick up on the fact that she was very unwell? You could see she was not OK<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Vandana recruited old friends from India now living in the UK to be her eyes on the ground. As well as Nafrey, she reached out to Karuna Kapoor, whom she\u2019d known for over 30 years but who had never met Naina. Every time the private investigator supplied a new address, Nafrey would travel from her home in Fulham, south-west London, to walk her dog around the property and see if she could spot Naina; Kapoor would travel from her home in St Albans in Hertfordshire to do the same. Naina\u2019s father travelled to London and spent hours waiting outside one address, only to learn Naina was no longer there. Vandana paid a domestic worker \u00a320 an hour to keep another property under surveillance.<\/p>\n
If Naina was in a paranoid state of mind, she had good reason to be: she was being followed and tracked. Vandana accepts this, but feels she had little choice. \u201cI wanted to see what she was doing in London. If she was all good \u2013 if she had a job, a social network \u2013 I\u2019d have let her be.\u201d Vandana shakes her head: \u201c2024 was a year I did not sleep. There was so much stress and helplessness. I was constantly thinking, what more I can do?\u201d<\/p>\n
Then, on 19 October, when Vandana was at her parents\u2019 home just outside Delhi, her phone rang. The name on the screen said Naina. \u201cI had a number saved, which the private investigator had given me.\u201d Vandana shuts her eyes. \u201cIt was 4am UK time. I picked up.\u201d For the first time in years, she heard her daughter\u2019s voice.<\/p>\n
\u201cMum,\u201d Naina said, \u201cwill you help me? I\u2019m in danger.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Vandana tried to sound calm. \u201cOf course I will help you,\u201d she said. \u201cWhere are you?\u201d Naina said she was at home in her flat, with the doors locked. She wanted her mother to verify her identity. \u201cTell me something only you would know,\u201d Naina said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI told her where she was born, when we moved to Singapore. I actually said, \u2018You were sexually assaulted when you first arrived in college,\u2019\u201d Vandana remembers.<\/p>\n
Identity confirmed, Naina told her the street outside her flat was filled with black cars, and people dressed in black were waiting to kidnap her. Her mother told her to call the police. \u201cThey won\u2019t help me,\u201d Naina said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll I wanted to do was make sure she stayed inside her apartment until Gauri could come and pick her up,\u201d Vandana says. She tried to contact Nafrey and her husband but, at 4am, they weren\u2019t responding. Naina suddenly wanted to speak to everyone: her brother, her grandmother, old friends. \u201cThese girls decided not to have any contact with me,\u201d Vandana says, bitterly, of Naina\u2019s friends. \u201cWhen Naina messaged them to say she was in danger, did any of her friends rush to help her?\u201d By 9.30am UK time, Vandana had bought a ticket to fly to London. By 6.30pm, she was on a plane.<\/p>\n
\u201cI woke up and saw six missed calls from Vandana \u2013 and then I saw missed calls from Naina,\u201d Nafrey tells me, still in disbelief. There were texts from Naina, too, saying she wasn\u2019t safe and asking Nafrey to pick her up \u201cas soon as you are able\u201d. Nafrey rang Vandana, who advised her not to ask Naina any questions. \u201cI literally got up, put my jeans on and ran. I was overjoyed \u2013 it was what we\u2019d been wanting to happen,\u201d Nafrey says.<\/p>\n
Vandana, too, felt joy and relief \u2013 but it was mixed with fear about her daughter\u2019s mental state. She reassured herself that she already knew the psychiatrist in Hong Kong who was treating Naina\u2019s brother. \u201cI knew what to do. I had to just remain calm and get her home.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nafrey drove to Naina\u2019s address. There was no fleet of black cars outside, nor people dressed in black. When Naina came to open the door to Nafrey \u2013 a woman she\u2019d known since she was a baby \u2013 her face was completely blank. \u201cNo recognition, no hint of emotion at all.\u201d Nafrey tried to hug her: \u201cIt was like hugging a statue.\u201d<\/p>\n
Naina had been packing. Her organisation was meticulous: each individual sock was carefully folded, then placed in a specific bag. The kitchenette was full of expensive Japanese ingredients and obscure wholegrains. It took an hour for her to be satisfied that everything had been correctly packed. \u201cWhere are we going? Am I going to be OK?\u201d Naina asked in Nafrey\u2019s car. \u201cShe was like a lost child,\u201d Nafrey says.<\/p>\n
She had plans that meant she could only look after Naina in the morning, so Kapoor agreed to collect her and look after her until Vandana arrived in London. \u201cMy first impression was that she was very quiet. There was almost a translucent quality to her, ethereal. You felt like holding her gently,\u201d Kapoor remembers. \u201cBut within a minute, I could tell she was not OK. She was so within herself, and absolutely frightened.\u201d<\/p>\n
Naina in St Albans in October 2024, just days before she died. Photograph: courtesy of Vandana Luthra<\/p>\n
When she arrived at Kapoor\u2019s home in St Albans, Naina told Kapoor her daughter was an impostor. \u201cShe said, \u2018I know she\u2019s not 13 and I know she\u2019s a spy. You\u2019ve trained her really well. She\u2019s a really good actor.\u2019\u201d She said that the dog \u2013 a soppy, sandy-coloured cockapoo called Ziggy \u2013 was also a spy. She inspected the corner of every room for hidden cameras. She told Kapoor that she knew there was a camera concealed in her necklace. Kapoor went upstairs and took all her jewellery off.<\/p>\n
At bedtime, Naina asked Kapoor to hug her to sleep. \u201cShe was like a seven- or eight-year-old,\u201d Kapoor says. \u201cI held her tight. She was lying down and I was just stroking her hair. Then she said, \u2018Why do you keep touching me all the time?\u2019 I said, \u2018I\u2019m really sorry.\u2019 I didn\u2019t want to say, \u2018But you just asked me to hug you 10 minutes ago.\u2019\u201d At 3am, Naina tried to open the patio doors and walk into the garden. She asked Kapoor if this really was a neighbourhood and not some kind of film set. They fell asleep together on the sofas in the living room. In the morning, Kapoor\u2019s husband discovered Naina had come upstairs with her pillow and blanket, and fallen asleep next to him.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow is it that anybody who interacted with Naina had not picked up on the fact that she was very unwell?\u201d Kapoor shakes her head. \u201cYou could see that this person was not OK.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vandana arrived at Kapoor\u2019s the next morning. She was struck by how fragile her daughter looked. \u201cHer skin was like glass. She was so thin, so fair, so shining \u2013 like bone china.\u201d Vandana went to hug her, but Naina looked at her in disgust. \u201cShe said, \u2018Are you going to take my teeth out? Are you going to take my eyes out?\u2019\u201d Naina demanded Vandana open her mouth so she could check her teeth, running her finger over her mother\u2019s molars: \u201cI just followed her instructions and stood there.\u201d Somehow reassured, Naina sat down on the sofa with her mother. \u201cI said, \u2018I\u2019m so happy to see you, Naina. I\u2019ve come to take you home, and you will be safe.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
They went for a walk in a park near Kapoor\u2019s house. \u201cSuddenly she said, \u2018Mum, you\u2019ve not even hugged me!\u2019 So I just stood still, and I hugged her and I hugged her.\u201d Vandana\u2019s eyes shine at this memory. \u201cPeople are walking past us, and the two of us are just hugging in the middle of the park. It was lovely.\u201d<\/p>\n
Naina didn\u2019t want to return to Hong Kong without her college diploma. It was in a box in the storage unit she\u2019d been renting, she explained, but it was Sunday and it wasn\u2019t open until the next day. The following morning, when Naina pulled up the door to her unit, Vandana\u2019s heart fell: there were dozens of huge cardboard boxes, stacked from floor to ceiling, taking up every inch of space. One contained 100 dishcloths, neatly folded, labelled and placed in Ziploc bags. Another held six different Longchamp shoulder bags. There was a vacuum cleaner, dozens of ice-lolly moulds, expensive storage jars, an air fryer, designer boots and yoga wear, and boxes and boxes of Jellycat toys.<\/p>\n
Vandana stared in disbelief, but Naina told her not to worry: everything was labelled. She had a spreadsheet documenting everything she owned \u2013 down to every nail file and pair of tweezers \u2013 the box it was stored in and the room in her future home where it would finally be unpacked. Throughout 2024 she had spent tens of thousands of pounds on things to fill her dream home in London. They found her diploma, gathered clothes appropriate for the Hong Kong heat and left the rest.<\/p>\n
They landed safely in Hong Kong the next morning, a Tuesday. On the train from the airport, Naina seemed lucid. \u201cWhat will I tell people?\u201d she asked. \u201cThat you\u2019re taking care of your mental health,\u201d Vandana replied. An appointment with a psychiatrist was booked for Saturday morning, and Naina had agreed to go. She started talking about how great her r\u00e9sum\u00e9 was \u2013 she\u2019d worked at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, after all, so she should easily be able to get a job in Hong Kong. Vandana tells me this between deep sighs. \u201cShe was planning her life. She was not suicidal.\u201d On the Thursday night \u2013 during a few seconds when Vandana was in the bathroom and not with her \u2013 Naina ended her life.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy daughter is gone, despite everything I did,\u201d Vandana says now. \u201cI don\u2019t know how bad her situation would have been if she had remained alive, but I had her right in front of me. I had her in my hand. And from my hand, she\u2019s gone.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the days after Naina\u2019s death, Vandana\u2019s brother and brother-in-law managed to log into her computer. They were looking for any documentation to demonstrate to the authorities that Naina had been mentally ill when she died. They found her psychotherapy bills, and text messages she had sent to her former friends \u2013 texts Vandana shared with me. What Naina said in them, and how her friends reacted, show both her state of mind and how ill-equipped they were to deal with it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve gone mad,\u201d Naina messaged a close friend in February 2022, around the time she was asking Vandana for baby pictures from London. \u201cI keep talking to the imaginary friends who came into my head when I was 12 and now my therapist tells me it\u2019s not normal.\u201d One of the voices was telling her to kill herself, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust remember how strong and loved you are. You can get through this!!\u201d the friend replied. \u201cGet rid of all the negative voices by replacing them with a million \u2018I love you\u2019s okay???\u201d<\/p>\n
There were texts to three friends in May 2022 in which Naina said the sexual abuse she remembered suffering in early childhood had been perpetrated by family members. But she gave different accounts of who was responsible to each of them. She told one she could remember being abused when she was six months old.<\/p>\n
I approached four of Naina\u2019s friends; only one \u2013 a close friend from college \u2013 agreed to speak to me, on condition of anonymity. She told me she and another college friend had done what they could to support Naina when she spoke to them about her memories of abuse. \u201cWe were doing our best. I don\u2019t think we were doing a bad job, but we were having to therapise for something we were not trained for. And she was seeing a therapist, so it felt like she was being taken care of,\u201d the friend says. Naina had been planning to cut herself off from her family for six months, she adds. \u201cNaina had asked me not to talk to her mom, and I agreed \u2013 from what I heard, they had done terrible things to her.\u201d<\/p>\n
The friend saw Naina for the last time when she visited her in New York in spring 2023. Naina was on medical leave from work, but was feeling optimistic, her friend says. \u201cIt was a fun visit. We did tourist things together. At the end, she told me that when she started her job, it was possible that she might be busy with work, and that I shouldn\u2019t take it personally if we lost touch \u2013 she\u2019d love and cherish me for ever. I wanted to respect her boundaries. I wished her well and we texted here and there but we didn\u2019t speak again.\u201d When she first heard the news, she didn\u2019t believe Naina was gone. \u201cI think about whether there are things I missed. I wonder whether she was in the right type of therapy. She needed someone to notice something that the rest of us didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
I feel sorry for Naina\u2019s friends. They were young and clearly wanted to help Naina and respect her wishes. When I put this to Vandana, her voice turns to ice. She says she can only \u201chave sympathy for their ignorance\u201d.<\/p>\n
In the end, Naina had no friends; her messages in 2024 were only to the people who taught her yoga. \u201cNaina fell through our fingers,\u201d Newton tells me, her palms pressed together, her fingers splayed. \u201cI wish I\u2019d tried to meet up with her, or find out where she lived, or who her parents were. I wish I had tried a bit more.\u201d<\/p>\n
No one at the yoga studio knew how to recognise psychosis. \u201cI\u2019d never been in contact with it before,\u201d Newton says. \u201cEven now, I\u2019m not clear what services I have access to. Where do I go? Who do I go to?\u201d She sighs.<\/p>\n
Nafrey and Kapoor arranged for Naina\u2019s boxes to be shipped from the storage unit in London to Hong Kong. They are now stacked up in her bedroom. Vandana has no idea what to do with them.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople have to know what mental illness is. I want to make sure high schools all over the world teach kids to recognise psychosis,\u201d Vandana says. \u201cAt every point, somebody or other came in contact with her who could have helped. I want Naina\u2019s story to go far and wide. She died because the people around her were ignorant.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Naina Mishra seemed to turn up at the yoga studio in Euston, north-west London, out of nowhere. She…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":131833,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[210,517,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-131832","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-mental-health","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114999094551872511","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}