Studying in London before taking up a high-flying job in New York, Naina Mishra seemed set for a bright future – until she began retreating from friends and family into a paranoid spiral even her mother couldn’t break. What does her story reveal about the dangers of young adult estrangement?
Naina Mishra seemed to turn up at the yoga studio in Euston, north-west London, out of nowhere. She wasn’t referred by anyone; she didn’t 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 “fell in” 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.
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. “She was really focused,” Newton remembers. “She would say, ‘My goals are to be a CEO, to have three children, to be married.’ She was really clear on what the future was going to hold for her.” By May 2022, she had left London to embark on her next chapter.
