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A friend of mine who comes from a family of psychoanalysts once passed along this professional advice that’s proven indispensable to me over the years. Whenever you feel yourself getting depressed for no particular reason, she said, “Aliwin mo ang sarili mo.” Cheer yourself up, and get to it.

Some would argue that this is escapist, that we should get to the root of our depression and bombard it with pharmaceutical pesticides. I agree that serious cases require analysis and even medication, but the first takes too long, and I would prefer not to interfere with my neurochemical composition if I can help it. Also, we’re not talking about serious cases, just the doldrums. “Your problem,” I told a friend, “is that you have no real problem.”

“I know that,” he said. “Oh, look, there’s a sale!”

Retail therapy is a time-tested method for cheering yourself up. And if your problem is that you have no real problem, then retail therapy could lead to an actual one: credit card debt.

Sitting around and doing nothing with your friends is another quick fix for low spirits. It may be combined with the imbibing of spirits — in moderation, or there’s another real problem (alcoholism). The caution against excess also applies to comfort food. I know this is hard to believe, and I have trouble accepting this, but there is such a thing as Too Much Chocolate.

I have great faith in the cheer-restoring powers of a bowl of ginisang mongo with a side dish of crispy dilis or fried tawilis. A bowl of champorado and tuyo would be even better, except that I don’t know any restaurants that serve this classic combo, and if I prepare it at home the whole building would reek of tuyo. Occasionally I’ll settle for bottled tuyo fillets in olive oil, but the brain rebels at the consumption of an oxymoron (gourmet tuyo).

A good trashy novel always cheers me up. Now that I think about it, my teen years would’ve been so much more miserable if I didn’t have those Harold Robbins, Judith Krantz and Sidney Sheldon paperbacks as anti-depressants. If you held those books by the spine, they would automatically open to the sex scenes. Whenever my classmates borrowed my books, I would helpfully point out the juicy parts.

But the anti-depressants that always work for me are old black-and-white movies. Black-and-white as in “not in color,” and old as in “made before I was born.” I think the preference for black-and-white movies has to do with the fact that when I was a kid, television was in black and white.

Therefore I associate black-and-white movies with the simpler, less complicated, happier days of childhood. Which can’t be all that simple, uncomplicated and happy if, as psychoanalysts say, our complexes are formed during that period.

As for my preference for movies made from the 1930s to the 1960s, I find the characters from that period so much more clever than contemporary movie characters. They were articulate and funny. They tossed off zingers as if they’d thought of them that very instant. We know that screenwriters provided those great lines (“I came [to Casablanca] for the waters. I was misinformed.”), but we can believe that the characters invented them. They could be silly and grown-up at the same time. Maybe I just wish the people I met in real life were like that.

Unfortunately, being three-dimensional and multi-colored, I am in the wrong universe. Look what happened in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo.

One time I got myself out of the pits by watching three black-and-white movies in a row. By a strange coincidence these movies all had a main protagonist who was a journalist, so I had someone to identify with.

The movies were His Girl Friday, directed by Howard Hawks; It Happened One Night, directed by Frank Capra; and Roman Holiday, directed by William Wyler. The journalists were played by Cary Grant, Clark Gable, and Gregory Peck, respectively. Having written for newspapers for the past 13 years, I can declare with all certainty that no journalist on earth looks like Peck, Gable, or especially Grant. Not even Anderson Cooper.

Note how the stars of old Hollywood seem so much more grown-up than the current stars. In the movies I mentioned, the stars were about the same age as Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and Johnny Depp are today. However, if you lined them all up (what a happy thought), Pitt, Cruise and Depp would seem like boys in comparison.

I think Depp could toss off the zingers as the hard-nosed editor in His Girl Friday, but I would think he was kidding. In that role Cary Grant was dead-serious, which made the movie (intentionally) hilarious. In the Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson called Cary Grant the best and most important actor in the history of cinema. I agree completely, and add that he was the handsomest. George Clooney, in contrast, looks like Cary Grant’s disappointing nephew.

Brad Pitt could conceivably play the reporter who finds himself traveling cross-country with runaway heiress Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night. After all, Pitt first attracted notice as the hitchhiker in another road movie, Thelma and Louise. Now imagine Pitt in Gable’s best-known role, Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind. Nuh-uh.

Tom Cruise could not play the American reporter who shelters the runaway princess in Roman Holiday. It is beyond the compass of my imagination.

No, I will not say that he could play the other role; it’s too easy.

So there you have another form of movie therapy: playing casting director. Incidentally, my favorite comfort movies are the aforementioned His Girl Friday, The Lady Vanishes by Alfred Hitchcock, and The Lady Eve by Preston Sturges. Hey look, they all have a female in the title…