Mentally ill persons are facing lots of problems to adjust in the society due to presence of stigma and discrimination. Though health personnel are well known about psychiatry disorders still in health field stigma and discrimination in quality care is present. Stigmatized attitude should be reduce by identifying the cause in health service towards mental illness for providing quality care and zero discrimination and increase motivation to work in mental health department and overcome the deficiency of staffs in clinical field. So. this current study was carried out on nurses’ attitude towards mental illness with certain objectives, those were to evaluate the attitude of staff nurses towards mental illness, to find out the attitude of student nurses towards mental illness, to compare the attitude of staff nurses and student nurses towards mental illness, to find out the association between staff nurses and students nurses’ attitudes with selected socio demographic variables. Material and methods: A descriptive study was carried out with 754 samples by using purposive sampling technique. Study was conducted at SUM Hospital and Sum nursing college,Bhubaneswar, Odisha. Result concluded that in both group negative attitude was present towards mental illness, but staff nurses were having less negative attitude than nursing students and there was no significant difference found between both the groups about attitude towards mental illness at at 0.05 level of significance.