Biopolitics of old age. suicide prevention as a population selection criteria

The aim of this article is to reflect on three topics that may be uncomfortable: suicide, old age and the problem of con-structing population statistics as devices in the production of policies aimed at their management. Uncomfortable topics, given that suicide has been configured throughout history in the West as a taboo (Nahuelpan and Varas 2018; Santos and Camacho, 2019), therefore, it is not a topic that is openly dis-cussed and reflected upon, but rather, it tends to be hidden or omitted in the stories of the relatives of suicides, remaining within the framework of privacy (Lledo, 2017); on the other hand, old age has currently been modulated as one of the ma- jor public health problems, in particular, due to the high cost to the State of managing and maintaining it within the ranges of normality and functionality; And finally, the problem of the production of statistical data which, although they can reveal theoretically objective realities and serve as a basis for the ma-terialization of initiatives or policies, for example, suicide pre-vention, these are circumscribed by the logic of prioritization, economic variables (Desrosieres, 2004) and based on a criteri-on of exclusion, since, logically, any prioritization action nec-essarily implies the postponement or denial of actions towards groups or issues categorized as non-priority.