How am I supposed to get over the anxiety and depression involved in all this?

[kissmarx]

Important lesson is to always keep multiple copies or backup of your wallet. It is also best to have a hardware wallet such as ledger or similar to it.

[fasdorcas]

1) I'm not sure if I believe your story

2) Hire a data recovery professional to try to retrieve your wallet data

3) Try to get a job (if you're currently jobless)

4) It's never too late to buy BTC

Yes, it is never too late to purchase bitcoins but the value he had in the past was much bigger.
50 BTC for now is a big amount and you can even purchase a good car with it. OP, you can try to hire professionals to retrieve your lost data.

[BTCLovingDude]

{snipped}
What am I doing wrong? 

your problem is that you think the only way to make profit from bitcoin is to buy it when it was $1 or so and sell it when it is $3000+
and because of that mindset you have missed a lot of rise so far.
take a look at the charts for the past couple of months or past year. the price is always on the rise and it will continue to be on the rise.

on the start of 2017 price was barely $1000 and now it is more than 3x higher! that means if you, instead of sulking, invested in it then you could have made 3x profit.

and it is not late now either! next year you will look at $3300 and say i wish i bought back then, i can't afford paying $7860 to buy 1 whole bitcoin now.

[BillyBobZorton]

1) I'm not sure if I believe your story

2) Hire a data recovery professional to try to retrieve your wallet data

3) Try to get a job (if you're currently jobless)

4) It's never too late to buy BTC

There is a big risk involved in sending your harddrive to someone else to (hopefully) get the data recovered, specially when you are dealing with bitcoins.

I know a case of some guy that lost BTC, and then he sent his HD to some service that claimed they would be able to unlock it, and they stole their BTC.

So I hope OP had an encrypted wallet, and make sure you are dealing with serious professionals.

[Ewinsane]

I was an early adopter. I never used the Silkroad or anything like that. I just liked collecting odd things. I bought 50 btc from a friend back in 2011 and just kept them in a private wallet since.
Well that Hard drive is now dead. I've been sporadically trying for years to get it to work. I'm at a total loss here. The market is at an all time high, and Im not sure another bear market is coming back.
I never had money to invest in this in the first place. But what little I did have I would throw into MTGOX (lol) and lost that shit too. After the GOX incident I took a couple years off of cryptos. I still had my private wallet I thought, until I went to retrieve it in 2015 and my hard drive was compromised somehow. I have 5 mill RDD/ 5 mill DOGE and 50 btc on that drive.
 Now it's at an all time high again and I am still broke. What am I doing wrong? 

I feel sorry for you. That such amount was nothing back then, but now it’s worth more than you can ever imagine. I will say the best thing for you to do now is to try and recover the drive. Maybe you should some BTC if you want to (any amount you can afford). But don’t ever forget to find a way of retrieving the drive.