This will probably annoy the die hard fans but completely change the way Cyberpsychosis works. At least from my under standing of it.
Instead of a attribute that determines empathy players get two bars. One bar is stress level, it starts at one hundred points. When ever you take damage your character makes a cool check, if they fail they lose some points from the stress bar. Other things can effect it such as getting insulted, playing high stake card games, exhaustion, killing or what ever else you can think of. All that stuff rolls against your cool so you don't lose points. Resting resets your stress bar to max.
The other bar is how much your character has been augmented. Every time a quarter of your body is augmented you take .5 to the stress bar every day. Once you get some where between 51-75% of your body being augmented resting no longer removes any stress lost that are caused by mental strain augments cause you.
To off set the eventual mental break down, cybernetic augmented players can be given a few options, but allot of it depends on player housing. Allow players to have a pet, longer players have a pet the more stress the pet can remove. Other stuff could be weight lifting, tending some type of vegetation like flowers, stuff that is small but is suppose to make the person still feel human. Positive stress building could lead to buffs, having stress lose reduced significantly or better performance in various areas. From this I'd want ability to skip over the lift weights or water garden scenes, as a mechanic it sounds good to me but its not some thing I'd want to watch after the third time.
This could also open the game up for addictions like alcohoelism or drug use. Where doing some thing like taking drugs might reduce stress, but over time you may need more of it. Which could result in some thing that is suppose to remove stress being a stress causer on its own.
Now for the good stuff, mental instability. Stress bar should have a thresh hold part, maybe last twenty five percent of it. Going into the red causes you to take penalties to your cool checks. In none combat situations, it could force you to have more irritated/aggressive dialogue selections or just out right attack some one. In combat effects should be rolled at random, depending on how low your stress is you could suffer multiple conditions at a time. Inability to no longer take cover, having to attack the nearest enemy NPC, perceiving all NPC's as a threat, penalties to combat rolls, bonuses to combat rolls, needing to run into nearest hard cover, being unable to fight at all, players characters hurting them selves, or maybe just spraying an area down randomly in bullets. Never knowing for sure how bad your character will react makes games like xcom fun, one moment your blocking bad guys away next your shooting your characters are gunning each other down in a panic.
To better serve up the effect add direct miss information to be given to players. If we have location based damage, make it appear that maybe a cybernetic implant is malfunctioning like a arm. This adds to the effect that not only is character panicking that their arm is broken, but that their player might also panic trying to fix the characters arm when nothing is wrong with it.