The Casson invariant and the word metric on the Torelli group

We bound the value of the Casson invariant of any integral homology 3-sphere $M$ by a constant times the distance-squared to the identity, measured in any word metric on the Torelli group $T$, of the element of $T$ associated to any Heegaard splitting of $M$. We construct examples which show this bound is asymptotically sharp.