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Many studies suggest that health benefits from engaging with the creative arts, but explanations of the association remain tenuous. This article explores both creativity and health from an anti-humanist perspective and develops a Deleuze-inspired analysis to supply the theoretical framework for creativity and health. In this view, creativity is an active, experimenting flow within a network or assemblage of bodies, things, ideas and institutions, while health is understood as the capacity of a body to affect and be affected by this assemblage. It is consequently unsurprising that there is a relationship between creative activity and health. This analysis is used to explore how creative production and reception can affect health, and to assess the implications for sociology and for arts in health-care practice.

This paper draws together findings from studies of health and identity to develop a model of health identities, based upon Deleuze and Guattari's approach to understanding the relationship between self, body and society. The model is used to inform a methodology for the empirical study of identities in relation to health and the body. Using a sample interview transcript, the methodology of analysis is demonstrated. The application of the model and the methodology for studying health identities are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]