What is the difference between a Seizure and a "Grand Mal Seizure"?!
Question:
What is the difference between a Seizure and a "Grand Mal Seizure"?
Answers:
Epileptic seizures were once classified as "grand mal", meaning a convulsion and "petit mal", meaning a staring spell. The latter came to mean a specific type of staring spell, now called absence epilepsy. "Petit mal" still confuses people who think it means any sort of small seizure, which it doesn't.
The modern classification centers on convulsions being called "generalized seizures", with an EEG abnormality all across the brain, as opposed to "partial seizures", which come from some local abnormality from trauma or other pathology.
So a "grand mal seizure" is one type of epileptic seizure, a convulsion.