I decided to email one of the the authors of the paper below to understand why he omitted admission counts in his paper

This is what I wrote. I doubt he'll reply. I'm not a professional nor an
academic. I'm just Joe Public.

I'll put what I wrote to him here. I'm not sure why I'm putting it on my
blog. Perhaps it's just to prove to anyone that reads this that I can be
polite as well as fucking swear and curse like a cunt.

"
This Friday night I'm reading a paper you co-authored published in the
British Medical Journal. A copy was available from the Rethink website
and BMJ press website.

I'm not an academic nor have any professional training in mental health
research however I take an interest because of my personal experiences.

The trend of increasing involuntary admissions is something I noted from
looking at the figures for a short period of time a few years ago from
what was available online to the public. Your study takes this a lot
further.

In the discussion you dismiss the possibility that severe mental illness
has risen. I have to admit that I agree that this is very unlikely. This
would be indicated by a rise in first time admissions. If this rose then
it could indicate that severe mental illness was on the rise or, of
course, that the use of involuntary detention was being used on a wider
group of people (for example if hospitals became more risk averse and
decided to use a section of the Mental Health Act rather than allow a
patient to remain voluntarily).

A rise in the rate of readmissions, e.g. a rise in the number of people
who returned to hospital in a year or at any time after their first
admission, may be able to add more information to base your discussion
upon the reasons for the increase in involuntary admissions.

I assume this sort of detail was not available from the NHS Information
Centre. I assume you didn't follow this line of thought because there is
no admission count for an individual. Am I correct?

I'm also somewhat surprised that there were no graphs or data provided.
It may not have been relevant for the discussion however it is always of
interest to people like me to see the raw data. I remember hearing about
the Rosenthal expectations experiment but when I looked at the data in
original paper it seemed like the effect was only present for the
younger age group. This is a minor matter. It's just some feedback from
someone who reads these papers which I feel may benefit you in future
published work.
"