NURsEs generally believe that the foremost aim of the profession is to provide adequate nursing care for the people of this country. It should be a matter of grave concern, therefore, that we don't provide adequate nursing care for over half of the patients who occupy hospital beds today -the mentally ill. A handful of nurses in the field of psychiatric nursing are struggling to carry a load for which, in the final analysis, the whole profession is responsible. Only recently has clinical experience in psychiatric nursing been made a requirement in most basic programs, and there is still a dearth of agencies which will provide such experience. Without debating the merits of the state hospital system, it is obvious that for some years to come most people who need psychiatric help will continue to seek it from this source and that the bulk of psychiatric affiliations for student nurses will probably be conducted within these hospitals. It also seems reasonable to suppose that the quality of the students' experience will determine to a great extent whether they will consider the field of psychiatric nursing for future employment. While the students in schools which provide psychiatric nursing experience should be one of the largest potential sources in recruiting nurses for this field, in actual practice this is far from the case. The next few years will be challenging and critical for psychiatric nursing and it is essential that this problem be clearly defined and that steps be taken to remedy the sources of the difficulty. While it is possible to speculate endlessly on the reasons why young nurses are not attracted to this field, the most direct way to approach the problem is to take the issue to the persons intimately involved the affiliating students themselves. In such an attempt, 158 students from 18 different hospital nursing schools were asked to respond anonymously to this statement: