On the day Mayview State Hospital officially closed, 17 patients remained on the grounds, some stranded in a zoning dispute that encapsulates the struggle facing mentally ill people as they move from institution to community.

The ongoing battle pits the Department of Public Welfare and Mercy Behavior Health, the Pittsburgh firm hired to care for some of the former Mayview patients, against a group of citizens in Baldwin Township. Mercy wants to convert a closed nursing home into a long-term residence for mental patients who require 24-hour supervision.

Mercy Behavioral argues that the Baldwin residents are stirring groundless fears, that the mentally ill clients who will be living in the former Rolling Hills Manor Assisted Living Center will somehow pose a danger.

Residents, who have packed hearings to object to the proposed Long Term Structured Residence, say Mercy Behavioral and the state have not been forthcoming with details and, when faced with a zoning rule that allows only a nursing home, switched their tack to argue that the mental facility is, in fact, a kind of nursing home.

The bitterness was captured in a sign propped on an easel at a recent hearing by the township supervisors:

Our Potential Neighbors
Mercy Calls Them:
Consumer Folks

Below those words is a list of five names, starting with Anthony Fallert, a former Mayview patient who walked from a Mercy Behaviorial home and fell to his death from the Birmingham Bridge. It ends with Richard Baumhammers, currently on Pennsylvania's death row for a killing rampage after a lifetime of mental illness.

Richard Rach, executive director of Mercy Behavioral, had to wonder at that sign. The people listed on it had already been living outside institutions. Richard Baumhammers lived with his family in Mt. Lebanon, an upscale suburb.

"Those folks were in the community. They were living independently," Mr. Rach said. "The energy here is about the dangerousness of folks. They're worried about someone breaking out and hurting someone. We have not had things like that happen in facilities like this."

He said mental patients are more likely to be victims than victimizers.

Without more information, Baldwin Township residents weren't conceding.

"They're all people that were under this program," said John Paravati, one of the residents leading the opposition. "According to this executive director these types of people aren't dangerous, they're just mentally ill. Well, there's a whole list here of Mayview patients. Two are dead and three have committed murders. Are these the kind of people they're going to be putting up there? We don't know. And legally they're not allowed to even tell you that."

In fact, two of the five men listed on the sign have been publicly identified as former Mayview patients and both died in apparent accidents or suicides. Of the three listed who were killers, none was listed on the sign as a Mayview patient. Only one, Mr. Baumhammers, was sent to Mayview for psychiatric evaluation only after his killing rampage.

Yet the concern among residents also is based on what they see as a lack of information. State and federal laws strictly prohibit care-givers from discussing, even identifying, their patients. So residents in Baldwin Township have no way of knowing for certain what type of patients would arrive should Rolling Hills reopen as a mental health facility.

"These people can't help they're that way. They need somewhere where they're going to be taken care of right and if they do get out they can get them before they run," said Theresa Frisoli, a retiree who says she worries her house will become unsellable and her neighborhood disrupted by fear.

Where, then, should the patients be sent, she was asked.

"I say fix Mayview."

In the final days of Mayview, Mary Jeanne Serafin, the hospital's chief executive, cranked up a closet-sized music box. A huge, perforated disc on the front promised to play "Marching Through Georgia." Amid rattles and plunks, the disc turned and struggled out a tune.

The contraption was sent to Mayview from Dixmont State Hospital when that facility closed. It will be sent along to Torrance State Hospital, the remaining state mental hospital in the region.

Its origins and role in the hospitals are as unclear as its future should Torrance ever close.

"Perhaps they were used for leisure, for dancing?" she said.

A therapeutic device?

"I don't know. I really don't know."

Next to the music machine sat a small, wooden box, a crude electro shock unit once used on patients. The dials suggest little more than a ramping up of voltage in search of the cure to depression, a disease for which patients were once institutionalized and which now, often as not, is handled with a daily dose of some pharmaceutical.

Doctors knew the shocks worked, but weren't altogether sure why, said the Rev. George DeVille, the now retired chaplain at Mayview.

"They would just use more and more electricity," he said.

At one time, a third of Mayview's patients would be there for depression.

Today, "you've got very few people in the mental hospitals for depression unless it's very, very bad," Father DeVille said.

The search for what worked for the mentally ill eventually led to today's closing. The literature of psychiatry and social work now argue that the mentally ill can, in most cases, fit back into the societies from which they were taken, and given care in varying levels.

"Institutions are no place for people to live," said Joan Erney, a deputy secretary of welfare in charge of the state's mental health programs.

Getting some people out of institutions such as Mayview takes a major break with time-honored practice and the inertia that sets in after a few years in a hospital.

Ms. Serafin, the Mayview CEO, recalled one woman, a longtime patient who, learning she would leave, had extensive dental work done to make her teeth look better.

"They said, 'Well, it didn't really matter.' Because they were here. And it matters now that they're going out into the community to be with people in the community," Ms. Serafin said.

Another patient, a woman who had been at Mayview for close to 40 years, returned to life outside the hospital and, after a while, called her caregivers to ask for help getting new clothes and to find a hairdresser.

"She said 'I don't look like everyone else. I need new clothes,' " she recalled.

Ms. Serafin's point is that Mayview can't be fixed because its premise is broken.

The average length of stay for a mental patient in the past decade, she said, has been six months.

People who stay longer than two years "you really start marking their stay in lengths of decades," she said. "People get institutionalized and the idea of leaving starts to become more and more frightening and then it's more and more difficult for people to take that step back into the community."

At a nondescript, single floor warren of offices on the South Side, a 42-year-old woman leaned forward into a chair in a conference room and told of her new life.

"My name is Yvette Doiley," she said. "I have been struggling with drugs and alcohol. I have been struggling with myself. I have had a hard life."

She has been in and out of Mayview months at a time, included stay that lasted a year, as she recalls it, after she went to a hospital emergency room convinced her face was burning. Doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia.

Mayview's plans for patients such as Ms. Doiley range from the long-term, fully supervised residences to group homes to independent, single-home living, the kind Ms. Doiley currently enjoys.

She cautions against assuming those with mental illness act alike.

"I never heard voices," she said.

Rather, she went through periods of what she calls "blank mindedness," essentially blackouts with no memory of precisely what she was doing.

Once every few weeks she receives a shot of an anti-psychotic medication as well as daily pills.

Her day, for the most part, consists of "minding my own business, taking care of my own business."

Word of the fight in Baldwin Township surprised her.

She lives in Baldwin. Nobody even notices her.

"They're wrong," she said. "These people just want to be to themselves also. They want to live a regular life like anybody else. They're not violent. They don't lash out at you.

"All they want is what they can't get for theirselves: They want help."