Abstract

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 (Lledó, 2017); on the other hand, old age has currently been modulated as one of the major 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 materialization of initiatives or policies, for example, suicide prevention, these are circumscribed by the logic of prioritization, economic variables (Desrosiéres, 2004) and based on a criterion of exclusion, since, logically, any prioritization action necessarily implies the postponement or denial of actions towards groups or issues categorized as non-priority.