Effexor and weird sensation

I was on effexor for a year to treat dysthimic depression and general anxiety disorder. My dose started low but was upped every few months until I was on 150 mg.

The side effects I experienced were:

- Dizziness
- Inability to sleep soundly at night (I would wake several times and have difficulty falling asleep again)
- Inability to stay awake during the day (probably as a result of the previous side-effect. this was so bad that i even fell asleep once while i was standing up!)
- A "fuzzy" mental state; everything looked cloudy, I had no concentration, poor attention span
- Frequent vivid nightmares
- This weird sensation that happened every couple of minutes. It wasn't quite like dizziness...it was more like my brain was doing a flip-flop in my head.
- I was ALWAYS exhausted
- My libido disappeared

The withdrawl affects of the drug were similar but also accompanied by twitching, nausea, increased dizziness, more frequent "brain flips", and occasional fainting or blacking out.

Worse was that I had to take the drug at the same time every day, or else I'd enter withdrawl almost immediately. If I took the drug at 7:00 AM every morning before school, and then slept in until 10:00 AM on the weekend, I would wake up in withdrawl, even though i was only a few hours late!

When I tapered off the drug, the withdrawl affects were almost unbearable for a couple of weeks, but eventually I returned almost to a normal state, except that it took over a year for my libido to return, and even though I've been free of the drug for a couple of years, I still have difficulties in that area sometimes.