Phd admissions with strange academic record and multiple schools? I am an undergraduate in my fourth and final year of getting a bachelor's degree. Next year I am thinking about applying to Phd programs in math (in any case I want to take a year between undergrad and grad school). However, I have a very questionable academic record in some respects.

My first year of college, I attended a liberal arts college known for its academic excellence. I did reasonably well the first semester, but the second semester I began to fall into a hole of depression and anxiety brought on what I will call a collision of being overwhelmed with coursework that I had never really been challenged by before and untreated brain stuff. I stopped going to class, stopped getting out of bed, and eventually ended up failing all of my classes that semester (like F fail).

I went back home and went to community college for the next year, and I got on medication for my brain stuff which, and this is not true in general but was and is true for me, was essentially a silver bullet that cured everything that was wrong with me and also unlocked a level of academic focus and ambition that I had literally never had before. 

I was able to transfer to a state research university after one year of community college, and that is where I am now. I have a pretty/very good GPA, I have taken a lot of classes in the past two years because I keep on getting excited about things and I am on a very limited schedule (I have taken ~2 times the normal course load per quarter over the last few quarters). I have developed good relationships with faculty and have taken a couple of graduate classes, and I have taken or am taking pretty much the entire pure math undergraduate curriculum with more classes then required for the major. I haven't been able to take grad classes in math because I only have 2 years here though- the ones I have taken were in applied math and CS. I have the expectation that my GRE scores will be good enough, as I have taken a few practice tests and I am generally good at standardized testing.

Now to my actual question: how disqualifying is my first year of college, and do any of you have any suggestions as to how I would explain what happened, or even if I should attempt to explain? 

I am willing to bite the bullet, but I will also say that I tend not to talk about that time in my life, or even really think about it. I am not the type of gal to dwell, and I thinking back to it is rather psychically painful. I have actually not mentioned the fact that I even went to the aforementioned liberal arts college to anyone at my current university as I have no interest in explicating the circumstances surrounding my exit from it. That is not to say that I feel that I am in danger of falling back into the same hole, just that I do not like to be reminded of my worst moments. 

Thanks!
I've had a somewhat similar rough start of college, with about three wasted years. I expected that it would very much be a problem as well. I'm now doing my masters and have a job that is very relevant to my field, and I've had some other relevant jobs as well. 

In the interviews for those jobs, and during my application for my master, the subject of my unusual first years of college came to the table of course. However, I found that when you talk about it, it shows openness which is generally appreciated. What I also experienced, is that it can give you a good way to talk about how you have grown as a person and what you've learned from those experiences. In my case, it made me much more determined, and I could easily tell what I now am capable of, instead of focussing on what I was incapable of. It sounds like this could also hold for you! Because with your story about the load you're taking on, I feel like nobody will really care about that one year, and people can and will focus on what you're doing now.