The battle by advocates to keep four of Chicago’s city-run mental health centers open appears to be reaching its end.

Chicago Department of Public Health spokesman Tim Hadac says the South Side centers are on track to close April 7, despite the protests of mental health advocates who have pleaded with Public Health Commissioner Terry Mason and city aldermen to save the centers, which serve about 2,000 people.

“It’s a delicate situation with a fragile population that we care about,” Hadac says. “We firmly believe that consolidating our staff, moving from a situation where we were stretched too thin at all locations to provide meaningful care, to one in which we believe we can, will prove wise in the end.”

The city is citing a $1.2 million loss in state funding as contributing to the closures.

The four centers slated to close are Back of the Yards, 4313 S. Ashland Ave.; Beverly/Morgan Park, 1987 W. 111th St.; Greater Grand/Mid-South, 4314 S. Cottage Grove Ave, and Woodlawn, 6337 S. Woodlawn Ave.

They represent one-third of the 12 city-run mental health centers.

Today, the waiting room at the clinic in Back of the Yards was full, even as clinics have begun the process of accepting appointments for patients who will be moving to new centers.

Barbara Morgan, a patient at the clinic in Woodlawn for about four years, says she is unsure of which clinic she will attend.

“I’m worried,” she says. “That’s the reality: It’s a disruption. We were going to the (clinic) that is convenient for us.”

Linda Denson, program coordinator for the city’s mental health clinics, says advocates began their protests too late. Rumors of mental health clinic closures began circulating as early as 2004, she says.

Federal stimulus money will not go to save the four centers, as some had hoped, she says.

At a sparsely attended community meeting today at the Martin Luther King Center, on south Cottage Grove, Denson discussed some of the changes that will be coming to mental health patients. Denson said the city is working to bring physicians to several mental health clinics so patients’ mental and physical well-being can be monitored.

She told patients who lead support groups at the centers that a new goal is to bring more empowerment to patients by focusing less on individual case management and more on community support.

With 2,000 people being dispersed throughout the city, advocates have worried there will be less personal attention available for patients.

But Steve Long, who attends the Lawndale clinic, which is absorbing patients, says he doesn’t think that’s the case. Long says the new patients might contribute to a sort of “cultural exchange.”

“We may contribute to some exchange about things that they don’t know, and they might contribute to an exchange of things we don’t,” he says. “Both groups could be better.”