For decades, in New Zealand and across the globe, suicide prevention policies and strategies have stagnated with more of the same psychiatric intervention. In this paper we report the first round analysis of a series of multivariate trend analysis using forecasting methods. We focus only on the question: what will the suicide rates be in ten years if we continue with the current suicide prevention approach? In New Zealand, official suicide numbers and rates are available for the period 1948-2018. Various time series were plotted and an Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) was fitted to the data. Results suggest that if we continue as we have done with a mental illness approach to suicide prevention then suicide rates will continue to follow an upward trend. And since the mental illness approach has been the only strategy then it can be assumed that there is a very weak or lack of relationship between mental illness and suicide. A change in approach is long overdue.