Background: Mental disorder is a disorder in the way of thinking (cognitive), volition (volition), emotional (affective), and action (psychomotor). Mental disorders are currently increase significantly and closely connected with the perception that led to stigma and discrimination. Nursing studies is basically divided into two programs, first is academic studies programs and professional education program. Reviewed in terms of exposure to people with mental disorders, lessons that learned from few stages in academic that been taught in the classroom, also from students in different professions to apply the learning phase significantly to patient and nursing stateon direct mentally interaction, in the end it can affect the perception of the student in both stages. Objective: Comparing the perception of students in academic stage and student in profession stage of UMY nursing students towards people with mental disorders. Methods: This research applying comparative descriptive method with collecting research by using sampling techniques. This research using simple random sampling for student in academic stage and purposive sampling for students in the profession stage. The total sample of 163 students. Measuring instrument used in this research was a questionnaire with 14 statements that include 6 internal perceptions and 8 external perceptions. Analysis of the data in this research were univariate and bivariate analysis using Mann-Whitney Test. Results: From this research, it was found that out of 163 respondents, consisting of 72 students of academic stage with the good perception of either 51 (70.8%), very good perception from21 students (29.2%). There was 91 total of profession stagestudent as much as 50 (54.9%) with the good perception, 41 (45.1%) students with excellent perceptionas well as the values obtained P value <0.05 which is 0,039. This shows that there are significant differences in perception among UMY nursing students in academic stage and professional stage towards people suffering mental disorders. Conclusion: There is a really significant difference between the perception of UMY nursing students in academic stage and profession stage towards people with mental disorders.