Background: Negative attitudes and discriminatory behavior of health professionals constitute a major obstacle in psychiatric care and have been pointed out as a key issue in working with mental illness. Understanding the attitude of nurses is crucial for the quality and holistic care of psychiatric services and essential for the successful integration of mental health into primary health care. However, there is a paucity of studies to examine the attitude of nurses towards severe mental disorders in the northern part of Nigeria. Aims: This study aimed to describe the attitude of nurses toward mentally ill patients in a Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Kware. Nigeria. Methods: All the nurses in the hospital were administered a 40 item Community Attitudes toward the Mentally Ill (CAMI) questionnaire which determines whether the mentally ill are viewed as “inferior;” deserve “sympathy;” perceived as a “threat” to society or “acceptable” if residing in community dwellings. The analysis of variance was performed to determine the association of the four subscales with the individual characteristics, including age, gender, education, qualification type, position held, contact and contact type. Results: Out of a total of 400 nurses, 248 (62%) completed the CAMI questionnaire. The mean scores for the authoritarian (2.71), benevolent (3.61), social restrictiveness (2.84) and community mental health ideology (3.29) subscales reflected a negative attitude of nurses toward mentally ill patients. The direct or indirect utilization of the mental health facilities resulted in significantly higher authoritarian and lower benevolence scores, indicating a positive attitude change in this group of nurses. Conclusion: Despite the small size and selective nature of the sample, nearly all the participants have a negative attitude towards people with severe mental disorders. Therefore, evidence-based and contextualized models are warranted to mitigate negative attitudes of nurses and provides useful baseline data for further large scale studies and underscores the need for psycho-education of different health care professionals, including nurses.