Background Negative attitudes and stigma towards patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) exist in mental health services.

Aim To investigate the hypothesis that nursing students have negative attitudes towards patients diagnosed with BPD.

Methods Two subsets of first- and final-year students completed the ‘attitude to personality disorder’ questionnaire, which contained two sections. The first covered basic demographic questions and the second contained 37 affective statement items rated on a six-point Likert scale.

Findings Both cohorts of nursing students expressed similar attitudes towards patients with BPD. However, nursing students in the first-year cohort had higher mean scores for all questionnaire factors and total scores compared with students in the final-year cohort.

Conclusion The optimistic attitudes of mental health students towards patients with BPD were indicated through feelings of enjoyment, security, acceptance, purpose and enthusiasm. This highlighted a need for health services to provide post-qualifying education to staff to maintain optimism and challenge the dominant culture of negative attitudes towards patients with BPD.