Is Frank Heffley Schizophrenic?
Frank Heffley IS Schizophrenic
Everyone watched “Diary Of A Wimpy Kid” growing up: it was a staple piece of most people's childhood, including everyone on the 24-25 Windup staff. Personally, I love these movies; they will never not be a classic in the Lawrence household. But one thing has always stuck out to me throughout my watches: what is up with Frank Heffley throughout these movies? This guy is constantly talking to himself and going out of his way to make his kids' lives a living hell– and he enjoys it!
In “Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules,” Frank spends half the movie losing his mind over something as small as a lock on a door, and to add to it, he has a full-fledged crash-out when he learns he was right. And don’t even get me started on his relationship with his kids. Frank is the definition of a father who loves to make things unnecessarily difficult. It’s almost like Frank is trying to create a full-on psychological trauma session for his children, and you can’t tell me it's just “tough love” because he's doing it all with a smile on his face. He's literally getting some twisted form of satisfaction out of it. Is he okay? It's also not just me saying he's a psychopath.
“Frank Heffley is pretty geeked, man. He obsesses over his mini war figurines and crashes out just because his children throw a little tiny party. They didn't even drink! It's just not as deep as Frank is making it out to be,” Eric Walsworth, 10, said.
While rewatching these movies, I’ve noticed that in Frank's attempts to “toughen” up his sons, he constantly threatens them with sending them to a military camp. I mean, Rodrick, I can understand, but why Greg? Greg is a… generally good kid, and there's no good reason, as far as Frank knows, to give him a hard time. What’s even stranger is that Frank doesn’t just act like this in isolated incidents. His entire character seems designed to be a knock-off of Patrick Bateman, just minus the murder (as far as we know). Frank is always creating problems for his poor sons and never misses an opportunity to mistreat and berate his children. He treats every situation like it’s a military operation and every disagreement like a life-or-death matter. And through it all, he’s got that creepy grin. His obsession with things like the lock on the door, the condition of the family car, or even his inability to deal with the simplest of household problems feels overblown, almost as if Frank enjoys torturing himself along with his family in the process.
It also doesn’t help that there’s absolutely no emotional depth or introspection about his behavior. In multiple scenes throughout the movie, Frank just sits there and talks to nobody but himself. Who is there, Frank?! Frank never questions whether his actions might be having a negative impact on his wife and children. Instead, he continues as if his way is the only way, convinced that his harsh methods and psychopathic behaviors are preparing his children for the harsh realities of life. Meanwhile, his son is just struggling to get through middle school (considering the cheese touch and everything), something that made it ten times harder to do while dealing with a freak for a father.
— Rose Lawrence
Frank Heffley IS NOT Schizophrenic
Crumbs on the floor, items out of place, doors in the wrong position… The clues are all adding up, and Frank Heffley is on their tail.
I’m here to set the record straight—Frank Heffley is not schizophrenic. Sure, he might be spastic and unhinged in his accusations and demeanor, but that doesn’t mean he has schizophrenia. I mean, God forbid a guy be a little suspicious!
According to psychiatry.org, “When schizophrenia is active, symptoms can include delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, trouble with thinking and lack of motivation.” So, by this definition, Frank is not schizophrenic. If he were, that would mean that everything he was seeing and accusing his sons, Greg and Rodrick, of was imagined. But anyone who watched “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules” knows that isn’t the case—Rodrick threw a party, trashed the house, and had Greg help him cover it up. You can’t watch the movie without acknowledging that these things really did happen.
It is understandable to see why someone might assume that Frank Heffley is schizophrenic—but only if that person were an actual character in “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.” To someone who wasn’t at Rodrick’s party and didn’t notice anything out of place in the house after the fact, Frank’s frantic rambling and desperate pleas for someone to listen to him do reflect the typical demeanor of someone suffering from schizophrenia: he has a strong, unwavering belief in what he’s seen, and no one else can seem to see it.
However, we, as watchers of this thrilling film, know the truth. To simply label Frank Heffley as schizophrenic is not only harmful to the narrative around schizophrenia, but it’s also just going to make the poor guy go even more berserk than he already is. All this case really is, is kids lying to their parents about something they weren’t supposed to do—something I think almost every reader can relate to. The severity of the situation was just exemplified by the characters’ extreme personalities and the fact that the story is told from a disobedient 12-year-old's warped perspective.
— Claudia Davis
