Stigma towards mental illness has a major impact on the quality of life and the health care of psychiatric patients. Several studies have reported that health professionals have more negative attitudes than general population.

To explore empathy and attitudes towards mental illness in nursing students (NS) and non-health university students. Our purpose is to see how NS have more empathic and less stigmatizing attitudes towards psychiatric patients, compared to other university students.

We tested 96 university students (50 NS and 46 non-health university students), with the following questionnaires anonymously filled out:

– Community attitudes towards mental ill (CAMI), to evaluate the different students’ attitudes towards mental illness;

– Empathy quotient (EQ), to assess empathy.

NS differs from the other group in 5 items of CAMI (P < 0.05 in 3 items and P < 0.01 in 2 items), and Authoritarianism subscale (P = 0.023). This shows that NS have a greater general awareness and less stigmatizing attitudes about the need to hospitalize the mentally ill, the difference between psychiatric patients and general population, the wrong need of segregation and the real causes of mental illness. There is also a significant difference in EQ (items 6, 21, 25, 44, 59): future nurses seem to have a slightly higher empathy, even though the EQ total score does not differ in the two groups.

These results suggest that there is a difference with respect to the attitudes towards psychiatric patients in NS and students who do not follow health-care courses: NS have more empathetic and less stigmatizing attitudes.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.