Cyberpsychosis: How Chrome Breaks Minds in Cyberpunk

Cyberpsychosis is a mental illness caused by too much cyberware. People who suffer it lose their sense of themselves as human, start to see ordinary people as weak and disposable, and often turn violent, with a body full of military chrome to do it with. Those who break are called cyberpsychos. (Cyberpunk RED; Cyberpunk 2077)

What cyberpsychosis is#

Cyberpunk 2077's database gives the medical definition. Trauma Team doctors use cyberpsychosis as a catch-all for every psychotic and anxiety disorder caused by implanted hardware, and by behavioural mods and software too. In the street version, it's the neighbour who took the chrome too far and opened fire on a crowd. (Cyberpunk 2077)

The effects build up. One cyber hand won't do it. Replace all four limbs and both eyes, and the slide may start. Cyberpunk RED says it can reach anyone with cyberware, but the less empathetic or stable a person is to begin with, the faster it comes. (Cyberpunk RED)

The signs are gradual: losing interest in friends, family, food and sleep, identifying more with machines than with people, and finding other people irritating, then contemptible, then targets. Violence is the most common end point, though some cyberpsychos become compulsive liars or thieves or split into fragments instead. (Cyberpunk 2020; Cyberpunk RED)

Humanity rules in the tabletop games#

The tabletop games turn this into numbers. In Cyberpunk 2020, a character's Humanity is ten times their Empathy. Every implant has a Humanity Cost, and every ten points lost knocks a point off Empathy. When Empathy hits zero, the character is a cyberpsycho and stops being the player's. (Cyberpunk 2020)

Cyberpunk RED keeps the same idea. Installing cyberware costs Humanity, falling Humanity drags Empathy down with it, and a character whose Humanity runs out becomes a cyberpsycho under the referee's control. RED also has therapy rules for winning some of it back. (Cyberpunk RED)

The Edgerunners Mission Kit, a 2024 RED box set, shows how far the rules can stretch. David's experimental Sandevistan costs Humanity every time it's switched on, and if the user's Humanity is already below zero it hurts them and throws them into extreme cyberpsychosis. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Mission Kit)

Cyberpsychosis in Cyberpunk 2077#

By 2077, better medicine and implants have made cyberpsychosis rarer, but people still go over every day. The police answer with overwhelming force, and hardly anyone survives the encounter. Corporations quietly send "medical teams" to pick up their own cases, and the database suggests those teams are hit squads. An expensive drug, baloperidol, is prescribed to people on the verge, with doubtful results. (Cyberpunk 2077)

The main way V meets it is through Regina Jones. Her Cyberpsycho Sighting gigs send V after cyberpsychos around Night City, and Regina wants them brought down without killing them so they can get treatment. Psycho squads like MaxTac handle the worst cases. (Cyberpunk 2077)

V never gets a Humanity meter in 2077. Update 2.0 replaced the old freedom to install anything with Cyberware Capacity, a hard limit that grows as V levels up. The Edgerunner perk lets V go up to 50 points over it, at the cost of health and a small chance of flying into a Fury after each kill. The perk's art shows David Martinez. (Cyberpunk 2077)

Songbird in Phantom Liberty#

Phantom Liberty gives cyberpsychosis a new cause. Songbird has been going through the Blackwall for the NUSA for years, and each trip cost her more of her body and more chrome to replace it. On the path where V helps Solomon Reed take her in, she taps the Blackwall to escape the stadium, falls into cyberpsychosis, and MaxTac arrives to take her. (Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty)

Cyberpsychosis in Edgerunners#

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners opens with a cyberpsycho. A former army officer goes on a rampage with a military Sandevistan in episode one, and David's mother, the paramedic Gloria Martinez, takes the implant off his body. The show draws the condition as a red glitch that tears across the victim's vision. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

Maine is the first in David's crew to go. He refuses to downgrade, starts having episodes, tears off Kiwi's cyber jaw in one of them, and finally loses all touch with reality in a fight with the NCPD and Trauma Team, and in his rampage he kills Dorio by accident. Maine blows himself up with MaxTac around him. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

David follows the same road. He has an unusual tolerance for chrome, but keeps adding military hardware and takes pills from the ripperdoc Doc to hold back the effects. Doc warns him the pills only buy time. By the time he climbs into Arasaka's prototype cyberskeleton, he is slipping in and out of sanity, and Lucy can only bring him back for moments. The Edgerunners guide tells the full story. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)