The best I can do is advise you a little on dealing with that $200k in student loans. The rest of this comment applies to just federal loans. For private education loans, you'll need to contact your lenders for details.

With that amount of loans, I'm assuming you maxed out your federal loans (which happens around $120k -- maybe a little north of that because of capitalized interest) and the remainder is in private loans. I don't know a whole lot about private loans, but, as far as federal loans, if you're making $50k with $120k in loans, you're certainly going to qualify for reduced payments, which will at least ease the monthly burden on you. You'll need to talk to your loan servicer, but, since the payments on income-based plans are based on a strict percentage of income (IIRC, 15% of your gross income is the max), based on the info you've provided, I don't see any problem whatsoever with you qualifying.

With your debt and income numbers, if you take a reduced payment schedule, you might end up with a payment less than the interest on the loan, which means you essentially never make progress toward paying it off. However, if you have this type of financial hardship for the next 25 years, your federal loans will be forgiven.

Now, if you work in a public interest-type job, there's the possibility you can qualify to have these federal loans forgiven in 10 years instead of 25 on the income-based plans. You'll need to contact your loan servicer for details on that.

Finally, because interest rates are essentially as low as they can get on federal student loans, you're going to be well-served by obtaining a federal student loan consolidation. Contact either your loan servicer or the William D. Ford Direct Loan program (http://www.loanconsolidation.ed.gov/) for details on consolidation.

This information came from three years experience at a company that consolidated federal student loans. I can also recommend the site finaid.org if you have any questions I haven't answered. I haven't read every word of every page there, but what I have read seems spot on. Specifically, you might find the following page to be of interest to you: http://www.finaid.org/loans/publicservice.phtml .

I hope this helped a little. Believe me, I understand the psychological and financial burden these types of loans can put on someone.