Exactly. A mentor of mine also in psychiatry labeled this as the difficulty of being a psychiatrist specifically and relating to others generally. We were having a discussion in the context of people who reject the very existence of some types of mental illness (e.g., anxiety, depression), and he mentioned his own difficulty in working with patients with addiction issues (opiates specifically) as someone with his own personal history of opiate abuse:

I'll give an example of my egocentrism. I've had multiple back surgeries after a work injury and was on heavy round the clock narcotics for 2 years. After my 2nd major surgery and my wound healed I told myself one day I'm not taking any more narcotics. Period. And I didn't. And went into violent withdrawal. I was curled up in the fetal moaning, waiting for it to pass. So on my addiction psychiatry rotation I was having trouble empathizing with heroine addicts and why they seemed convinced they would die if they didn't get their suboxone. I asked my seniors on the psych forum about my rejection of their experience. Learned from them. And after thinking about it decided I was stuck with the problem of viewing things through my own consciousness which had the resources and ability to go cold turkey. And that not everyone was me. This is both the problem of the doctor/patient relationship in psychiatry and why it is so fascinating. It requires the commitment to imagining the consequences of alien consciousness to our own.

The last sentence especially I think is critical to truly "getting" empathy and understanding your fellow man. Needless to say, that's not the kind of stuff you're typically going to see in online comments, where the whole interaction is extremely superficial at best and totally artificial at worst. Artificial not because it's not face-to-face but because the very nature of an online persona allows it to be edited, created, and willfully produced. Your attempt at relating to an online persona may be futile because the persona is just that and not a real person.

By the way, I absolutely love this blog. One of my favorites.