We explore the relationship between empathy and toxicity in the context of online mental health forums. Despite the common assumption of a negative correlation between these concepts, it has not been empirically examined. We augment the EPITOME mental health empathy dataset with toxicity labels using two widely employed toxic/harmful content detection APIs: Perspective API and OpenAI moderation API. We find a notable presence of toxic/harmful content (17.77%) within empathetic responses, and only a very weak negative correlation between the two variables. Qualitative analysis revealed contributions labeled as empathetic often contain harmful content such as promotion of suicidal ideas. Our results highlight the need for reevaluating empathy independently from toxicity in future research and encourage a reconsideration of empathy’s role in natural language generation and evaluation.